These are the most memorable Spanish-language novels of the year

2

Hector Abad Faciolince

Now and in the hour

Also autobiographical is that of the Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince entitled “Now and on time”. He captures the horror of the war in Ukraine after first-hand experiencing a Russian bombing of innocent civilians in a town near the battle front, which killed, among others, the Ukrainian writer who was sitting right next to him as soon as he changed places at the terrace table. There is a reflection on tragedy, chance and death, with pages of overwhelming emotion.

3

Cristina Fernández Cubas

What we don’t see

“What is not seen” is the title of the first book of short stories published by Cristina Fernández Cubas after receiving the National Literature Prize. Some of them visit the genre of fantasy literature in which she proved to be an undisputed master.

4

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Mission to Paris

Fourteen years after the last opus, he returns Arturo Pérez-Reverte to the world of Alatriste in the novel entitled “Mission to Paris”. From the Venice with which the previous one closed to the Paris of today, both with Francisco de Quevedo as a hinge. Readers were grateful for this return of a Captain Alatriste whom they now find more disillusioned, and to whom time has added a melancholy particular. Besides, the novelty is the homage that Pérez-Reverte pays to Alejandro Dumas and the three musketeers, with events and theatrical events in the same Parisian spaces as Dumas and in La Rochelle.

5

Luis Mateo Diez

The local guard

Luis Mateo Díez, in the first novel published after winning the Cervantes Prize which receives the title “The Guardian of the Corners”, approaches a critical perspective by drawing a Satire of Valleinclanesca about the political corruption of one of its shadow cities, in which, as almost never before in the author’s work, the Spanish news imitates the world of rascals and scoundrels, of the Monipodio patio recognizable in our socio-political contexts.

6

Elvira Navarro

Blood falls in the courtyard

The young Spanish female narrative was a fertile year in the culture of storytelling. I highlight two authors, Elvira Navarro and Pilar Adón. The first, with the book “Blood Falls in the Courtyard”, brings a unique world of fears to the cities and urban outskirts of Spain and Paris. Elvira Navarro traces subtle no-win situations that arise for those living in precarious conditions that cannot be equally captured by realism and that require a keen eye like hers, from the outside in.

7

Pilar Adon

you will make them angry

It is childhood, in particular that of girls, the world that populates “Las iras” by Pilar Adón, which brings together in its stories the power, the anger, the submission to which the girls protagonists of each story are forced, which have no explanation outside of a particular symbolic universe, which is, on the other hand, what gives unity to the whole. As almost always happens in Pilar Adón, in confined and difficult spaces.

8

Javier Cercas

The madman of God at the end of the world

With “The Fool of God at the End of the World”Javier Cercas returns to his style of non-fiction novel, in a multi-genre title where the travel book (accompanying Pope Francis in Mongolia) is added to the essay in the form of a Socratic dialogue with the priests and missionaries of the Vatican, and which once again has the singular research that Cercas gives to books published in novel form. They all focus on one question, in this case the meaning of religion and faith in our world, a question asked by those who lack it.

9

Juan Manuel de Prada

A thousand eyes hide the night. Prison of Darkness

Juan Manuel de Prada publishes the second volume of his monumental novel published last year – ‘The City Without Light’ -, ‘A Thousand Eyes Hide the Night. Prison of Darkness”, in a Paris and a France invaded by the Nazis, where real characters rub shoulders with invented ones and where the picaresque, the traps and the interested ideological metamorphoses are told with a particularly brilliant style, which takes us back to its origin in “The Masks of the Hero”.

10

Pilar Quintana

dark night

The Colombian novelist Pilar Quintana With “Noche Negra”, she delivers a disturbing metaphor about the difficult conditions of survival for women in a world where the jungle is much more than a geographical environment.