Books to visit Long Island, space or past

Shit on several places in a matter of minutes from the hammock of a Camping de la Costa Brava or the Catalan Pyrenees is possible. It does not matter fate. You can travel the Long Island beaches, sit down to eat in a Kyoto tavern and explore the hostile Caribbean jungle. Also make a brief stop at a space station or take the occasional jump in time. It is easy. You just have to get some books. Here is a selection of works that cover from the narrative and the biography to the essay, with news and some classic, so that the trip is complete.

Those who want more after the unusual blackout last week can read Baby Carrington (Swath). A solar storm gives rise to this scenario until recently unthinkable in the new novel by Jordi Santasusagna. No light, neither mobiles nor the Internet. And two escaped teenagers. The appearance of a baby in an electrical substation in flames and its rescue by the protagonists begins this apocalyptic story that has just reached the bookstores. They also try to survive in a hostile world the characters of The jungle sky (Lava), by Elaine Vilar Madruga. To ensure your strength it will be key that the jungle, a hungry deity, is well fed. Those who inhabit it only have a way to keep it happy: give their children as part of a cyclical cannibal tribute. No woman of this Caribbean horror story can refuse to be a mother. Raising its offspring as future food is key to their survival.

Those who wish to return to the unusual blackout last week can read ‘Baby Carrington’

Of the warm and humid climate, and the abundant vegetation, at temperatures below zero, ice and snow. In his Arctic newspaper (The horizon line), Josephine Diebitsch explains his experiences during the year he spent in Greenland on the occasion of the 1891 expedition commanded by her husband, Robert Peary. She was a pioneer of ethnography and anthropology, and her work has helped know the habits in one of the most inhospitable corners on the planet. Another American who toured a long distance and then captured his anecdotes on paper was John Steinbeck. A poodle bleu large called Charley was his travel companion over 16,000 kilometers for thirty -four states aboard a motorhome. That journey had as a result Trips with Charley (Nordic), a search for American identity with moments of exaltation and melancholy.

The journalist Saharaui Ebbaba has a very different reality in Paper flowers (Peninsula). Here the author focuses on the history of the Saharawi people through the testimony of three women: Aisha, Naima and Leila, who are granddaughter, mother and grandmother. Despite being a fiction work, what is told has a lot of real and autobiographical.

Perhaps a place like Long Island seems more peaceful. Emma Cline – author of The girls (Anagrama) – takes the reader to his opulent beaches and streets with The guest (Anagram). But what initially looked like a dream place for the protagonist becomes an awkward scenario that time seems not to advance. Los mysteries of La Taberna Kamogawa (Salamandra), by Hisashi Kashiwai, on the other hand, is a tender and succulent trip. Their pages travel the memories of those who feel at the tables of this Kyoto Meal House, who run a father and daughter. The volume of time I (Anagrama), by Solvej Balle, is an exploration of memory, love, loneliness and monotony, which in this case is triggered after its protagonist was trapped on November 18.

No monotonous has the story of Orbital (Anagrama), which counts the day to day of a group of six astronauts that during the four thousand hours that they will live in space will reflect on how they have arrived there and if they expected. The Spanish who fell in love with the world (Books of the Asteroid), by Ignacio Peyró, is another interesting trip, in this case for the life of Julio Iglesias, as well as a fifty -year story of Spanish social life. And as the last stop we propose Love (Hermida), an essay that collects fragments about the love of Notebooks that Simone Weil wrote from 1934 to months before his death.