There tends to be a lot of prejudices with best-seller lists. There is a somewhat snobbish way of thinking that identifies bestsellers with low-quality texts and that is not always true: there are very well-written and entertaining bestsellers, and supposed masterpieces that are rubbish and there is no where to take them. There are also bestsellers that lovers of good reading do not get beyond page 20…
We bring five books that are really good and that are at the top of the best-seller list so far this year. Recent historical novels, horror stories, lesbian fiction or the literary testament of the recently deceased Paul Auster constitute our selection among the top ones.
‘Telluric stories’ (Rodrigo Cortés)
Random House Telluric Tales
Rodrigo Cortés offers a refreshing -despite its complicated reading and full of stylistic resources- collection of stories in ‘Telluric Tales’ (Random House), a prodigious elaboration of language and fantasy suitable for those readers capable of diving into the layers of a story. Magic abounds in stories in which any character has a place: cats, grain fields, caliphs, declarations of quantum love, letters that come from the future or even characters that are trapped within characters. Baroque and charming.
‘A sunny place for gloomy people’ (Mariana Enríquez)
Anagram A sunny place for gloomy people
Mariana Enríquez returns to Anagrama with a book that brings together twelve horror stories that do not take us to monsters, fantastic creatures or strange spirits, but to the horror of everyday life. ‘A sunny place for gloomy people’ She reveals all the talent of the Buenos Aires woman to terrify us with the simplest circumstances. For example, a couple has rented a house in a town where the train has stopped running; They visit an art exhibition in the abandoned station, but the terrifying thing will be meeting its author. Or the terrifying persecution that NGO volunteers suffer from strange black-eyed children while they distribute food in a marginal neighborhood.
‘Baumgartner’ (Paul Auster)
Seix Barral Baumgartner
The recent death of the writer Paul Auster has boosted sales of his latest book, ‘Baumgartner’ (Seix Barral), which is also a perfect legacy of his influential work. In less than 300 pages, Haruki Murakami’s favorite writer, who was encouraged to write a book about old age and memory loss in his last battle against cancer, presents us with a tender and strange writer and university professor who makes 9 years ago he lost his wife. The story remembers how they met as students in 1968 and how they remained together for forty decades. While he tries to overcome the absence of his old age, he evokes wonderful stories from his youth or from the life of his father to conclude that, at different stages of life, we love differently.
‘The Child’ (Fernando Aramburu)
Tusquets The boy
We are going with another short but intense book, which will please not only fans of the author, Fernando Aramburu (who has many), but also those who like to discover recent episodes of Spanish history. Based on the accident in Ortuella (Vizcaya) that in 1980 caused the death of fifty children, the novel is based on the devastated lives of the members of a family and their attempts to overcome a harrowing experience. In ‘The boy’ (Tusquets), Nicasio, now retired, usually goes up to the Ortuella cemetery on Thursdays to visit his grandson’s grave. He is one of the many children who died after a gas explosion at a school in that town, an accident that shook the Basque Country and all of Spain in 1980.
‘The seduction’ (Sara Torres)
Reservoir Seduction
Two years after ‘Lo que hay’, we get the latest from Sara Torres, a new novel in which she talks about desire, distance and sexual fantasy and about the importance of sweetness as a healing tool. ‘The Seduction’ (Reservoir) introduces us to a young photographer who contacts a writer twenty years older to take some portraits of her while she works on her next novel. After exchanging several emails, the writer invites her to spend a few days at her house, a small farmhouse on the Catalan coast, where the author will not allow herself to be photographed. How will the tension be broken?
