The properties of thirst
Marianne Wiggins
Asteroid Books (2024). 616 pages €29.95 (paper) / €14.99 (digital).
Widower Rocky Rhodes lives with his twin children, Sunny and Stryker, on a ranch in Owens Valley, California. Shortly after the beginning of the Second World War, an internment camp was built very close to that ranch, to which thousands of citizens of Japanese origin were taken. Water and its scarcity, as well as the landscape, are essential elements in a story that talks about cultivating roots and in which its author intertwines several love stories: sentimental love, love of the land and family love.
Commander
Edoardo de Angelis and Sandro Veronesi
Anagram (2024). 192 pages €18.90 (paper) / €10.99 digital.
The novel begins at the naval base of La Spezia, in Italy, where Salvatore Todaro, the commander of a submarine, leaves for the Atlantic. After Gibraltar, they sink a Belgian ship and, contravening the orders of his superiors, the commander decides to rescue the castaways. The novel is a tribute to the good feelings of the protagonists, who humanize events that could have had a much cruder development.
Missing
Tim Gautreaux
The Big Garden (2024). 584 pages €25 (paper) / €12.34 (digital).
The novel is set at the end of the First World War. Just when soldier Sam Simoneaux, a twenty-something from Louisiana, arrives on the shores of France, the armistice is signed. Despite not seeing combat, he knows devastation and pain. On his return, he works in security at a department store, where – on his floor and during his shift – a three-year-old girl is kidnapped. As a consequence, Sam loses his job and will help the parents get their child back. The novel highlights the actions of a young man who fights to redeem himself and the drama of parents who face a heartbreaking loss.
The friends of my life
Hisham Matar
Salamander (2024). 464 pages €23 (paper) / €10.99 (digital).
An emotional story about exile and friendship, which begins in 1984, when two young Libyans meet at the University of Edinburgh. On a trip to London, they participate in a demonstration in front of their country’s embassy, with the misfortune that they are injured in a shooting. For a few days they stop going to class so as not to be discovered by Gaddafi’s henchmen. This fact is the bond that will bind them together forever. A few years later they met a writer somewhat older than them, Husam Zow, who also had the audacity to criticize the dictator. The three have a lot in common and, despite certain differences, they weave a loyalty between them that seems unbreakable.
Inside the cauldron
Kiyoko Murata
Hermida Editors (2024). 100 pages €17 (paper) / €9 (digital).
Tami, the narrator; Her brother Shinjiro and her cousins Minako and Tateo spend the summer vacation with her grandmother, who lives alone in a village surrounded by forested areas. The author describes with great delicacy the relationships between the grandmother and her four adolescent grandchildren. On the one hand, respect, admiration, surprise at such a different way of living (food, customs, meetings with other elders…), but also the difficulty of understanding it. Added to this are the stories that the old woman tells them about her ancestors, that she reveals to them a panorama that they did not know and that affects them more than she could have imagined.
Maniac
Benjamin Labatut
Anagram (2023). 400 pages €21.90 (paper) / €12.99 (digital).
Labatut once again unites fiction and reality, science and literature. In its pages he profiles the life of the Hungarian scientist John von Neumann and does so through the half-figurative testimony of friends and detractors. Newmann was the enigmatic architect of Maniac, one of the most powerful computers that made possible the infinite calculations necessary to create the most destructive weapon that has ever existed: the hydrogen bomb. Labatut’s works are usually a wake-up call to the destructive repercussions of an unleashed science, immune to the most basic principles of morality.
The stone angel
Margaret Laurence
Asteroid Books (2024). 344 pages €21.95 (paper) / €10.99 (digital).
Set in a fictional town in Canada, this novel contains the memoirs of Hagar Shipley, a ninety-year-old woman who lives with her son Marvin. Due to the frequent forgetfulness and constant health problems, her son, overcome by his mother’s character, decides that he enters a nursing home, a decision that causes a crisis in Hagar and is the trigger for telling about his present life and the numerous memories. that assault him from the past. The author creates an excellent character, an authentic woman, not at all complacent.
In praise of hands
Jesus Carrasco
Six Barral (2024). 320 pages €20.90 (paper) / €9.99 (digital).
The narrator of this novel and his family receive a loan of an old, dilapidated house that they will use on vacation for several years. There they spend happy times, receive friends and, above all, work on the house itself to make it useful and cozy in its rooms. The whole family collaborates on endless tasks. Illusion, imagination and creation fill their weekends and annual vacations, in which there is no shortage of friends with whom to share good times. The detail of narrative details is astonishing and the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of its characters are full of vitality and emotion.
Return to Little Summeford
Reginald Arkell
Periférica (2024). 288 pages. €21 (paperback) / €12.99 (digital).
Charley Moon is a boy who lives in an English village of just six houses. He is not very fond of studies. He does not know what he will do in the future, until he discovers the incredible sound of the harmonica… The novel follows the evolution of his protagonist as she enters the world of entertainment. We will discover with him the chiaroscuro of fame and high society Londoner. The story has moments of undoubted lyricism and good humor, although the saddest stupidity and banality also occur.
Almost
Jorge Bustos
Asteroid Books (2024). 192 pages €19.95 (paper) / €9.99 (digital).
Starting from a personal experience, Bustos has written a “chronicle of helplessness” about the homeless who live on the streets of Madrid. A change of address causes the author to come face to face with the reality of homelessness, as he moves to live in Madrid to a place near the San Isidro Shelter (Almost is its acronym), a care center that welcomes more than 300 “users” who, due to different circumstances (unemployment, alcoholism, divorce, drugs, mental illness, etc.) have ended up on the margins of society. The author does not emerge unscathed from this experience and the frequent contact with these people has accustomed him to looking at others with different eyes.
Morning and afternoon
Jon Fosse
Nórdica and Deconatus (2023). 112 pages €18 (paper) / €8.99 (digital).
Short novel by the latest Nobel Prize winner, a good test for many readers to get to know his particular style. First we witness the birth of a child, the son of a fisherman, who will be called Johannes. Then the death of the old man Johannes is told (at first, when he still does not realize what has happened, and later, when he already recognizes the situation). The speech, always in the third person, moves forward and back fluidly to tell of Johannes’ entire life: the incidents when he was born and the thoughts of his father; his courtship and marriage, his children, his job as a fisherman, his relationship with his friend and neighbor Peter, etc. The prose is simple and, we would say, musical.
The Sandcastle
Seicho Matsumoto
Asteroid Books (2023). 415 pages €21.95 (paper) / €10.99 (digital).
Seicho Matsumoto was a prolific Japanese writer who became famous for his original, meticulous style in which he describes Inspector Imanishi’s deductive methods. In this novel, the action takes place in Japan in the mid-20th century in a traditional society that has not yet entered modernity. The plot begins when a signalman, during a routine check, discovers the corpse of a terribly mutilated man. Inspector Imanishi takes charge of a case about which there is very little information. Apart from being well written, one must admire the overwhelming logic with which the narrative advances and the background themes that Matsumoto subtly introduces, penetrating deeply into human nature and allowing us to understand the murderer’s reasons.
The boy
Fernando Aramburu
Tusquets (2024). 272 pages €20.50 (paper) / €10.99 (digital).
Aramburu was inspired to write this novel by a real event: the death, on October 23, 1980, of about fifty children in a school in the town of Ortuella, in the Basque Country, as a result of a gas explosion. The author focuses on how a local family experienced these events, whose son, Nuco, just six years old, is one of the victims of this accident. The author knows that he is facing a narrative challenge, since an event of these characteristics can arouse morbid literary inclinations that take the prose to the precipice of sensationalism. At all times, the author tries to approach these true events as a sincere chronicler who describes that specific reality in an authentic way.
Everyone will know my name
Tony Gratacos
Destiny (2024). 768 pages €23.90 (paper) / €9.99 (digital).
After the success of Nobody knows, a novel inspired by Magellan and Elcano’s first trip around the world, the author now writes about Hernán Cortés’ conquest of the city of Tenochtitlán and New Spain. The narrator is once again Diego de Soto, an aspiring chronicler. His fame reaches Hernán Cortés, who wants him to write about what happened during the years of the conquest of those lands. At the same time that De Soto joins Hernán Cortés’s circle of friends, he discovers that he has very loyal friends and also powerful enemies. It is worth highlighting the ease that the author has in linking one intrigue after another, starring historical figures who were faithful to Hernán Cortés or who wanted to get rid of him.
