A she-wolf who wants to be free, but can she survive without her pack? Lucy wants to escape from the territory of her father, a powerful and fearsome politician, who is also a prominent organized crime boss in northern Mexico. Her attempt to escape does not follow a well-defined plan, which is why she is captured by Treviño, one of her father’s faithful henchmen. But Lucy does not give up, even if in her escape she loses almost everything: her comfortable life, her handful of friends, her lovers, her bodyguard… Everything, except her gun. But this is only the beginning: in her tender years she will get to know degradation, death, misery, perhaps incest. Maybe her vague hope of escape will not come true. Maybe her wolf-pack is bigger than she imagines. Maybe there is no escape. But Lucy is nothing if not determined, and all her experiences give her new strength to take on whatever may happen.

She-Wolf (“Loba”) is a fast-paced and dizzying novel about the abysses of the human soul and Mexican society today, a novel that by its unlikely extremes gives you the most unexpected and clearest insights, and with a long-lasting reverberation in the reader’s mind.

Monterrey, north Mexico: By the side of the powerful drugs lord Julio, the student Fernanda lives an extravagant life: parties, sex, and plenty of money. In return she devotes herself unconditionally to her man, with a love that is to change to its cruel opposite when Julio is no longer the one Fernanda used to know.

Fernanda is a young woman who has everything and yet, haunted by her own past and the lack of control over her own life as the lover of a narcotics boss, she descends into a downward spiral of dependence and violence. Brave Bitch (“Perra Brava”) is a fast-paced, powerful novel, in which glamour, wealth and beauty are mere facades of corrupt Mexican society.

Germano Alemeida’s new novel Misfortunes of a Governor in the Tropics (“Infortúnios de Um Governador nos Trópicos”) is set in the 1820s. Colonel João da Mata Chapuzet, who had distinguished himself as a brave military man, especially in the war against the French invaders (he was one of the royal family’s escorts when they fled to Brazil, but he himself returned immediately to Portugal to take part in the war), was appointed military governor of the always half-abandoned colony of Cape Verde. His main mission was to bind the colony tightly to the mother country, putting a stop to a handful of renegades who wanted to integrate the islands into a greater Brazil that was already seeking independence.
And after organising his large retinue in Lisbon, he set off, arriving without any major mishaps at the new capital of the islands, Vila da Praia. Here João da Mata proved to be as skilful and effective in politics as he had been in war. But he forgot that putting things in good order begins with ourselves, with our own house. And in this respect everything went wrong for him.

Confession and Guilt (“A Confissão e a Culpa”) brings to a close a trilogy of works that the author has now grouped under the collective title THE MINDELO TRILOGY. It recounts an event that took place in the city of Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente in the Cape Verde archipelago. This event, which shook the country, was the strange and unexpected murder of the famous Cape Verdean writer Miguel Lopes Macieira, the pride of the island, by his closest friend, Engineer Edmundo do Rosário, at the very moment of the well-attended launch of his latest book, eagerly awaited by all the people of Mindelo. From the first line of the first volume: “Everyone was taken by surprise, so no one tried to prevent the murder of the islands’ best-known and most widely translated writer, mere moments before the start of the launch of what turned out to be his final work.”

The author now offers us the opportunity to find the answer to the question: Why did Edmundo do Rosário murder his best friend just as he was preparing to be celebrated once again by the people of Mindelo? That is the subject of this third volume of the trilogy. The murderer now has the floor.

The Last Bellow (“O Último Mugido”) is the sequel to The Faithful Dead, which ended with the writer’s murder at the hands of his best friend. In this instalment, his wife, Mariza, returns from America to carry out the writer’s will, specifically his public cremation in a square in Mindelo.

With The Faithful Dead (“O Fiel Defunto”), Almeida offers a snappy satire on the cultural scene in his Cape Verde homeland. Miguel Lopes Macieira, the island’s best-known and most-translated author, is shot dead by his friend Edmundo de Rosário at the launch of his first new book after years of silence. The jealous drama is centred on Matilde, thirty years younger than Macieira and loved by both men. The novel is less about solving a crime than about human relationships and how state and church want to share in the writer’s popularity. Finally it is Mariza, Macieira’s former companion who had always come second to literature during his lifetime, who gets the author’s will out of the safe. Around the sometimes grotesquely exaggerated events, Almeida creates a small cosmos of lovable characters with their own stories. Its language of a humorous, empathic narrative makes the novel unmistakable.

In his novels, Almeida unmasks the hypocrisy of public and private morality in the Republic of Cape Verde (and elsewhere). His most effective artistic tool is humour: Almeida is a master of all arts of literary comedy and his observations on society are sharpened by irony and sarcasm, puns and slap-stick-like situation comedy.

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo (“O testamento do Sr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo”) is a highly witty and entertaining book telling about the life of a rich old-school macho on the Cape Verde islands. Amusingly enough, this man owes his economic and social progress to thousands of umbrellas which he once ordered by mistake. No one on the islands ever really needed an umbrella since it hardly ever rains. Fortunately though, this day the heavens were understanding and tore open just at the right moment…

In 2004 the novel was mentioned in the London TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT as one of the Best Books of the Year by Pankaj Mishra:

Germano Almeida’s The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo introduced me to a writer of great comic gifts.

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo is the predecessor of the great novel My Poet (“O meu poeta”). Almeida’s third novel is entitled The Fantastic Island (“A ilha fantástica”) and in 1995 he published The Two Brothers (“Os dois irmãos”), a gripping story about a case of fratricide.

In his novel, Eva, Luís Henriques and Reinaldo, the narrator, are roaming the streets of Lisbon at night in December 2000. The occasion for their meeting is Eva. Both know her, and both know of each other from Eva’s stories. 25 years ago, she was Luís Henriques’ first love. Now he is curious to find out about this other man in her life. Is he a friend, or even a lover? The backdrop is Lisbon, from the 1960s onward to the Carnation Revolution, and the challenging life on Cape Verde against the background of more recent political developments. From a strictly Catholic bourgeois parental home, Eva moved to Lisbon to go to university, evidently exerting an irresistable charm on the male sex. Here she gets caught up in politics and meets and falls in love with Luís Henriques. After she returns to Cape Verde, she marries the candid Zé Manel without further ado, but embarks on a relationship with Reinaldo. Is it Eva, ultimately, who pulls the strings in all these relationships? The two men are faced with ever more questions and many remain unanswered when they part.

As in previous novels, Germano Almeida knows how to use a priceless story to tell the history of the Cape Verde Islands and their peoples.

Ummi (“Ummi. Una historia de la migración palestina”) is an Arabic word which translates as “my mama”. Baboun has chosen to follow her Ummi as she reconstructs her family’s memory, moving freely between memory, chronicle and biography. Her recollections go back to Palestine, her ancestors’ decision to escape, and the struggle to build a new life in distant South America. Baboun lets her own Palestinian, Greek, and Chilean roots transform her novelistic style, using this research as a starting point to navigate the discovery of family secrets and stories. The book is also the story of the author trying to find her own cultural identity in Chile, the country with the largest Palestinian population outside of the Middle East. Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, Isabel Baboun has written with masterclass a book that is as moving as it is unique.

In her novel The Thai Woman (“La tailandesa”), Baboun presents us with Diana, a woman in her forties, at the verge of a turning point of her life. She feels trapped in both her private and professional life, not really connected to nobody and not even to herself and her body. She feels betrayed by Maxi, the man with whom she is living in the same apartment, and by Nancy, her supposed best friend, who snatched a role offer from under her nose and is now the TV starlet she could have been, instead of remaining a teacher at the high school where she has already studied herself. Thai boxing gives her a kick, a glimpse of self-empowerment. But only acting on stage enables her – herself and Moisés, Nancy’s little son with whom Diana “rehearses” a borrowed motherhood – to take a break from reality and to really feel free, to follow only herself without any outer rules, and to be who she really is.
Like Mieko Kawakami, Baboun creates protagonists representing the contemporary woman, delving into different aspects of femininity and maternity, in an always entertaining, witty style and a highly original language. The Thai Woman is a feminist novel of archaic force.

The novel Kid (“Cría”) focuses on the relationship between the narrator Zina and her parents, whose influence she believes she has escaped from in recent years. Zina lives in a small town in southern Chile with Joan, an older American woman, while she pretends to her parents that she is based in California. Her father has repeatedly beaten his wife and daughter and bullied them, and her mother, otherwise self-confident and fun-loving, has never managed to free herself from this situation. When she asks Zina to come home urgently because her father has to undergo heart surgery and could die, Joan encourages Zina to go along with the request, but not to regard it as a return home as her mother would like, but merely as a temporary visit. Zina agrees, but feels an anxiety settle on her chest, a shadow that reminds her of the gloom of her parents’ home. When Zina arrives in Santiago, she is caught up in the margins of the social unrest that shakes Chile in autumn 2019, in particular its capital city after the brutal deployment of security forces on 18 October. These events reflect her father’s violence, from which there also seems to be little escape. Her parents’ influence is revealed to be fully intact when her father’s heart surgery leads to complications that require a partial lung transplant. Ever the good daughter, Zina follows her mother’s pleas to help her father, and her spirit of resistance only stirs when she is being prepared for her own operation and the anaesthesia begins to take effect…

In 1954 Bessa-Luís became famous with the novel The Sibyl (“A Sibila”) which draws a realistic portrait of the rural population of northern Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Considerable psychological astuteness and analytical acuity make this novel a masterpiece of Portuguese literature. In her novels the sexes are separated by traditional gulfs, though these are frequently traversed. The female figures act according to intuition and stand for preservation and permanence. By contrast, the men are interested in bringing about change and accelerating time. The author’s language and narrative technique are reminiscent of Camilo Castelo Branco, the great nineteenth century Portuguese writer. In addition to sensitively portraying characters, Agustina focuses mainly on social and political change in northern Portugal.

Abraham’s Valley (“Vale Abraão”) narrates the life of Ema Cardeano, the only daughter of a father who was widowed early. She seems to find happiness when she marries Carlos Paiva, a mediocre doctor from the countryside. Disenchantment with marriage comes quickly, the rites of patriarchal society suffocate her. The successive lovers who were supposed to restore her happiness push her into an increasingly anguished and empty life. Her transgressions are a fleeting consolation, loneliness a path she will forever walk, until the bitter end.
An exceptional rewriting of Madame Bovary and adapted as a feature film by Manoel de Oliveira, Bessa-Luís’ psychological insight is astonishing, the descriptions and the protagonist’s reflections on the female condition dazzling. It is that which is expected in so many books and discovered in so few; simply a masterpiece.

Several of her novels have been filmed by the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira: Abraham’s Valley (“Vale Abraão”), The Lands of Risk (“As terras do risco”) as well as Fanny Owen. Agustina Bessa-Luís has also written film scripts (Party) and theatre plays. Between 1986-87 she was editor of the newspaper O Primeiro de Janeiro (Porto). From 1990 to 1993 she directed the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon. Since the 1960s she has been a member of numerous national and international academies and writers’ associations. Her works have been translated into many languages and she has been awarded important literary prizes.

Bizzio immerses us in a fascinating literary experiment with an international fashion magazine, which he turns into the raw material for a reinvention of language, and using the cut-up. We Know What Happens at Night, Snail (»Sabemos lo que pasa por las noches, caracol«) is the result of a work that defies all kinds of conventions left and right. As well as a play with words, the work is a singular reflection on the nature of language, of meaning and its capacity to evoke emotions and sensations (in this case extremely strange ones). In short, „almost everything in these pages“ invites us to enter a unique universe, made of both conscious choices and chance, where creativity and imagination – both Bizzio‘s and the reader‘s – are the exclusive protagonists.

In A Beautiful Place (“Un lugar precioso”), two novellas (about the holiday of a couple who meet an unexpected acquaintance on the beach, and the unusual small-town nature of Martian abductions) are connected by the paranoid idea that approach and invasion function as synonyms. A beautiful place designates both the familiar space of the beach house and that of a parallel, simultaneous universe accessed by crossing the crystalline membrane of a bubble. But what strategy, however complex, can be employed to cope successfully with the surprises of fate, which test us in the uncomfortable presence of a person or the disturbing familiarity with a being from another planet? In Bizzio’s irreverent literature, the phenomenal pleasure of the written sentence can be followed by a crackle of splintered nerves, and the idyll by a hell of interstellar bureaucracy.

Mirages detach themselves from reality like the mercurial vapor of distance on a road. Ethereal. It is there and yet unreachable. When we think we have mastered it, what we believe to be real folds in on itself, or unfolds like a magician’s handkerchief.
Sergio Bizzio pulls back the curtain. Everything seems to be as it is. And yet… knock on the glass and some peculiar members of the human species reach extraordinary speeds; a doll comes to life and dies, or someone has to struggle with the power to make all their wishes come true…
In Bongo Fury, Bizzio reveals the richness of his art. Time accelerates exponentially; voices become inaudible; geographies shift and bodies twist in unusual acrobatics. Each story opens up to the unknown dimension of the times we live in.

Beyond the well-known stories of Juan Díaz de Solís, Pizarro, Magellan and Columbus, there are many others that were forgotten and lost; some distorted and falsified, and others, perhaps, that never had the chance to be told. Bizzio takes advantage of the gaps in history to give free rein to his imagination in a short, intense piece about the clash of civilisations.

The Lost (“Perdidos”) is a fast-paced novella, told in the first person through the diary or logbook entries of an explorer of the new world. A surprising and dynamic read with powerful and well-constructed episodes that weave together a succession of encounters and misfortunes, adventures with the indigenous people and nature in a jungle as dangerous as it is beautiful: the Amazon. Showing the fragility, helplessness, fear and sense of humour of these men who, despite their role in history (in today’s eyes destructive and criminal), were still fathers and sons with families on the other side of the ocean to whom they hoped to return.

-What are you doing disguised like that? Aren’t you warm?
-I’m not disguised, I’m from another planet.

Three Martians (“Tres marcianos”) are three brilliant tales with protagonists who come from the countryside, the city or other planets.

A gaucho assures his courtesan that there is a flying saucer parked on the top of a mountain and that, that very night, they are invited to meet its crew.

A being that can only be visited by appointment has shaken the life of the whole village; the neighbours are unable to comprehend what happens during these encounters.

After a space journey of more than two years, a couple meets again, but the embrace becomes unsettling: the other seems to be not exactly the same person they left behind.

Three close encounters of the first kind in the best Bizzio style: captivating from the first line, visual throughout and leaving the impression – or the doubt – that they really happened.

After their wedding party, Carlos and Irina go on a honeymoon: Ten Days in Re (“Diez días en Re”). She is happy; he is still a little drunk. They take a plane, get on a barge, and after many hours travelling they arrive at the beaches of Re. The landscape is perfect. And while looking at Irina smiling from the shore, a devastating certainty falls over Carlos: he does not love her. This thought stuns him in such a way that his arm is left stiff for days and he can’t move it. Carlos wanders like a soul in pain trying to make sense of his existence and thinking about how to proceed.

From what is initially perceived as a story of a separation, something else soon arises. The story mutates and twists, and drags us through the sand of its tropical paradise into the deepest bewilderment. On the scenography of a honeymoon, Bizzio sets a series of elements that stretch the limits of reality. Page by page the story becomes a new one, becoming thick and magnetized like the jungle that surrounds the characters. Once again Bizzio unfolds his sharply delicate prose, immersing us once more, with a disturbing naturalness, in a universe full of strangeness.

At the age of twelve, Irina lost her mother in a road accident. The next day she was sent to live with her father in Huel, a tiny village in the middle of the plains. For years she had not heard from him. She could only remember him as an office worker with an orderly life. Now he was a savage who looks after his physique: he eats raw eggs for breakfast, breaking them directly into his mouth, dressed in a sack and tie.

Life in Huel is monotonous and idle, until her father’s ex-wife returns with the intention of taking their house from them. They begin to build a new one nearby, but day after day they find the foundations destroyed. From then on, the plausible begins to get strange and twisted.

In My Life in Huel (“Mi vida en Huel”) Sergio Bizzio explores with delicate precision the social, aesthetic and amorous fantasies of an out-of-the-ordinary teenager in a world where the borders of the possible become increasingly diffuse. His mastery of the construction of atmosphere keeps us floating, flying over the land of an unusual and disturbing village.

Borgestein tells the apparently everyday story of a marriage crisis. Julia is an actress who only ever thinks of her career. When her husband is attacked by one of his patients he withdraws to a house in the mountains to think about his own life and their life together. With typical absurd narrative moments and unexpected twists and turns, the author has created a jewel of current Argentine writing.

As a star author grows tired of his success, he uses a plane crash to stage his death and starts a new life in the jungle. In his latest novel The Eaten Writer (“El escritor comido”), Bizzio takes the reader on an unusual and imaginative adventure while posing elementary questions on mankind today.

Written with the quiet humour and the fresh and concise style that characterise Bizzio’s books, Aiwa tells a tender and unusual love story in a world both bizarre and ordinary. When the teenagers Aiwa and Sony meet, it is love at first sight, but they have to hide their relationship. However, there are mysterious changes going on in Aiwa’s remote village, and soon a group of scientists disturbs their quiet life. What will they find?

In Bizzio’s novel Reality (“Realidad”), an Arabic terrorist commando hijacks an Argentine television channel in order to put pressure on the government to hand over a traitor. The Afghan head of the intruders is fascinated by the dynamics of the broadcasted reality show Big Brother and decides to use it to dismantle Western values. Indeed, the candidates accept any form of humiliation in order to become famous. As the hijackers are finally overwhelmed by the police, the fictional existence of the contestants ends and they return to real life – or is it the other way round?

It Was the Sky (“Era el cielo”) tells the story of a faltering relationship. Only a few days after making up with her, a man watches his wife being raped. He remains undiscovered and the two of them never utter a word on the matter. Caught up in the resulting dynamics, the protagonist sleepwalks towards the edge of a psychological abyss, only saved by his love for his son.

Rage (“Rabia”) is a fast-paced love story revealing the lives of the lower classes with psychological empathy and a good dose of black humour. After a heated argument with his foreman, the construction worker José María ends up strangling him and flees to the palatial villa where his girlfriend Rosa works as a maid. Hiding out in one of the attics, he watches the family. Then Rosa is raped…

Violence (“Violência”), the new novel by Fernando Bonassi, is a raw and brutal synthesis of Brazil. With irony and precision, its plot and characters portray the political and social violence of a nation built on colonial legacies.
It’s Saturday night when a political advisor receives a writer and his wife, a university professor, at his home. The advisor’s aim in inviting them to dinner is to get the writer’s support for his candidate’s campaign. But an armed robbery surprises everyone and reveals the deepest layers of violence that permeate Brazilian daily life – physical, political, sexual, racial, class, and gender. With a raw and brutal narrative that takes place over a weekend, Violence portrays a Brazil built on slavery, prejudice and social inequality.
The short chapters hiss at the hypocrisies, privileges and vices of the dominant political class; at police corruption and brutality, as well as their vulnerability; at domestic, political and prison racism, from its most subtle manifestation to the one that kills. Once again, Fernando Bonassi constructs a plot that is extremely critical of the current structures of power and control, with a comic narrative and strong cinematographic content, and striking characters that are extremely recognisable to the Brazilian imagination.
Without shying away from the brutalities, complexities and social contradictions, the book concludes a kind of trilogy by the author, which also includes Lust and Degeneration.

Anyone who wants to understand, in depth, Brazil following the military dictatorship, has to read Fernando Bonassi’s coherent and prolific work. Since his first books, in the early 1990s, Bonassi has recorded, in novels and short stories and plays, the various setbacks we have gone through, with the privileged and critical eye of someone who knows Brazilian society in their guts. Possessing an unmistakable voice in contemporary literature, Bonassi has chosen the suburb – the title of one of his most important novels – as the location for his books. This suburb, portrayed in the excellent Lust, published in 2015, and to which he returns here in this magnificent Degeneration (“Degeneração”)– a decadent suburb of São Paulo, like all other Brazilian suburbs, inhabited by a lower middle class that struggles with all weapons at its disposal to survive, harassed by brutality and lack of prospects.
Degeneration is almost a natural unfolding of Lust. In the latter, the author portrayed a family who, believing that access to material goods would guarantee social recognition, sees euphoria turn to violence. In Degeneração, this violence resurfaces even more crudely when we follow the saga of the son of a police informant trying to release his father’s body for cremation, during the weekend in which the election that put the extreme right in power is held. Terrifying metaphor – the inside, the outside, the private, the public – everything flows into the cul-de-sac in which we collectively find ourselves. (Luiz Ruffato)

Fernando Bonassi’s novel Lust (”Luxúria”) gives an account of an unnamed man who, inspired by a glossy magazine and to impress his wife, decides to crown his self-assumed wealth by building a swimming pool – on credit and in the garden of his dwarf-sized house in a social housing area. Little by little, like a chain reaction, the absurd building process exposes not only the drain pipes of the neighbourhood but also the gaping abysms of everyday bourgeois life. In debt, harassed, jobless and driven by his own demons, he tries to kill his dog before he finds a final solution for his family and himself.
Lust is a parable of the nation’s circumstances: the “new Brazilian middle class”, taken completely by surprise by their unexpected wealth, staggers head-on and without any moderation into the entirely foreseeable crisis. In relentlessly sober language, as if set in harshly exposed photographs and bold camera shots, Bonassi meticulously illuminates the lives of his protagonists. A fast-paced, disturbing novel that keeps the reader glued to his seat.

Bonassi – I do not write to entertain, I write to disturb myself and my reader – is unafraid to express, in verbal and written form, how he sees society in his country and the people in his city. His novel Suburb (“Subúrbio”) was one of the very first books to come from and deal with the world of the bleak suburbs which has long since reached the city centres. High walls, electronic barriers are of little use any more. The world of the privileged few can no longer cut itself off. What sort of a world is this, asks Bonassi, which constructs such walls, instead of confronting and combating misery, showing these people a way out. The novel A Sky full of Stars (“Um Céu de Estrelas”) was made into a prize-winning film by Brazilian director Tata Amaral. That he can also be entertaining he demonstrates in the crime story Marital Crimes (“Crimes Conjugais”), an exciting, briskly moving story of big city crime.

The novel Counterevidence (“Prova Contrária”) tells the story of a woman who receives an indemnization from the government since her husband supposedly disappeared after having been tortured by the military regime. One day her husband returns… was he really the political hero his wife had believed him to be?

The Boy Trapped in a Fridge (“O Menino Preso na Geladeira”) has experienced nothing but privation and hollow promises by a corrupt government in a destroyed country. He therefore builds himself a large fully equipped fridge and locks himself in, as to isolate himself from the outside world. After a number of crazy coincidents, however, he suddenly becomes a national anti-hero. This is an absurd story, which seems to take place very far away, in truth, however, portrays a well-known reality.

Amalia is a woman in her forties. She is the secretary of the CEO of Suministros Vallejo, a family business that is going through difficult times. Organised and efficient, she nevertheless lacks sympathy, a quality needed to keep inopportune visitors at bay. She is implacable. Amalia leads her life in her own way, with defined boundaries, narrow but comfortable. And predictable. She seems to be happy with this, thinking that she does not need anything else. Until one day she meets Lazaro, a maintenance technician who comes to her office to fix something. His character is the absolute opposite of hers; his spontaneity and tendency towards chaos awaken unexpected feelings in her. So much so that from then on she begins to invent things that need fixed, or even damaging them herself, with the sole purpose of having him around. Knowing that he loves to dance, she also starts to attend dance classes…

In Dance Classes for Office Workers (“Clases de baile para oficinistas”) Burgos proves again his wide range of skills and his gift for empathizing with his characters in an authentic and original way, making his readers laugh out loud and start thinking deeply about what it means to live.

Sofía and the Blockhead (“Sofía y el terco”) is the story of one last big dream. For years now, Sofía has been asking her stubborn husband to take her out of their mountain village on a trip to the sea, so many years that the two of them have grown old. And so Sofía, her best friend Mercedes and the silent David come up with a plan… A delightful novel about desires and happiness achieved late in life.

In a refreshing style, Fight Manual (“Manual de pelea”) tells the captivating story of a boy growing up in 1990s Medellín. Fourteen-year-old Santiago’s main interests are girls, his standing in the school pecking order and soccer. But while the fights in the schoolyard are still fought with fists, the brutal laws of the narcotics mafia have long since taken over in the rest of society. In an almost innocent, humorous tone, Burgos describes the end of a childhood.

Membrane (“Membrana”) is a highly original novel that puts a spectacular twist on the tradition of speculative fiction from Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. LeGuin, Donna Haraway and Ted Chiang. Narrated by a complex artificial intelligence in the year 2100, it tells the secret history of the 21st century: how algorithms gradually took power and secretly built a monumental museum in the Amazon jungle to tell the story of how they became an empire. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”, said Walter Benjamin. The story we are reading, which takes the form of the catalogue of The 21st Century Museum, under which name the novel won the Barbastro Prize for Literature 2021, is no exception. To write it, Jorge Carrión – one of Spain’s most acclaimed and widely translated writers, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times – has invented a neo-language, somewhere between narrative, poetry and essay, which imagines how the artificial intelligences of the future will write. An experimental and philosophical novel that reads like a thriller. A great reflection on the tumultuous relationship between technology and humanity.

Winner of the prestigious Ciudad de Barbastro Prize, worth 15,000 euros.

Did the 21st century begin with the fall of the Twin Towers in New York or with the entry of a virus into a man’s body in Wuhan? Is SARS-CoV-2 the first cyborg pathogen? Are Netflix, Zoom and Amazon multinational pandemics? How can one represent the transformation of science fiction into everyday reality? The Viral (“Lo viral”) is, at the same time, a meticulous reconstruction of the first months of the coronavirus from personal experience, a fragmentary essay on digital virality, the memory of a quarantined library, an experiment in cultural criticism and a false but sincere diary that manages to keep the reader in permanent brain activity and throws up a series of essential questions about the future that awaits us.

Picking up where Bookshops: A Reader’s History left off, Against Amazon (“Contra Amazon”) explores the impact of new technologies on bookshops and libraries. Collecting Jorge Carrión’s essays on these vital cultural spaces, as well as interviews with the writers who love them. Jorge Carrión travels to the innovative libraries and bookstores of Seoul; in Naples and Capri he researches the history of the mythical house of Curzio Malaparte; he interviews booksellers and writers; he talks about books and cities with Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara and Han Kang; he interprets the libraries of Don Quixote and Captain Nemo, and pays homage to some of the world‘s most fascinating bookstores and libraries. Against Amazon is in equal parts a history of books and bookshops, a reader’s autobiography, a travelogue, a love letter – and, urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive pressures of modern-day capitalism.

In his new book Barcelona: Book of Passageways (“Barcelona. Libro de los pasajes”), Jorge Carrión invites us to stroll through the streets of Barcelona and especially its passageways, those elements of urban life that bring people together and contain hidden stories. The author wanders around the city, speaks with passers-by and the inhabitants of the passagaways. He rediscovers historical characters and stories that have contributed to the development of the city. Carrión tells us about Barcelona, but in reality he is talking about urban spaces all around the world, and the book is also in some ways a tribute to Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”.

In The Deceased (“Los difuntos”), Jorge Carrión tells the prequel to The Dead (“Los muertos”), set in a fictional 19th century New York City. In this society where technological progress reigns, “new ones” are enslaved in order to ensure the working of the steam machines. With time, they will climb the social ladder and become the “old ones”. In this scenario the philosophical ideals of Dionysos and Apollo materialize in the main character, who will battle against the decadence of progress and the oppression it generates. Jorge Carrión brilliantly narrates this tale about the search for identity and purpose set in a fictional world that is in many ways much like ours – from the alienation of the human being in a technological world, to the high price the “new ones” are willing to pay for the American dream.

Jorge Carrión’s book Bookshops (“Librerías”) is a survey of the history of bookstores all over the world, their relationships with writers and how they became the center pieces of culture and political resistance, making a trip through the history of the book trade from Ancient Rome to the 21st century. Nostalgic yet demystifying, this extraordinary book is the result of many readings, researches and visits to bookstores on the five continents, veering between cultural critique and travel chronicle. Librerías has come second in the prestigious Anagrama Award for Essays.

In his cleverly construed novel The Footprints (“Las huellas”), the author brings a number of essential topics like identity and human relationships together with moments in time and space, keeping the reader glued to the page. Reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Las huellas features a suggestive plot and vivid characters that make us question the future of our planet.

A arte de morrer longe (“The Art of Dying Far Away”) is an entertaining satire about a series of apparently unimportant causalities which turn the lives of a middle-class Lisbon couple upside down. Arnaldo and Bárbara have been happily married when one day Bárbara believes she may be in love with her employer’s son. Arnaldo responds by saying that he too is having an affair, although this is not true. On dividing their possessions, they find that neither wants to keep the turtle they once bought together. With fluid language and sharp irony, Mário de Carvalho cleverly portrays society. This amusing novel full of slapstick elements will have the reader laughing out loud or grinning silently to himself.

After the huge success of Niketche, Chiziane has now written The Joyful Song of the Partridge (“O Alegre Canto da Perdiz“), her fifth novel. Niketche dealt with the phenomenon of polygamy – the heroine discovers that her husband has more wives and families – whereas with The Joyful Song of the Partridge, Chiziane sheds light on the role of African women in the colonisation process. At the heart of the novel is the beautiful Delfina, who leaves her poor black husband and marries an affluent white man. Her aim is to bear children with lighter skin, thereby making it possible for them to have a better life. She is racist in her dealings with her own children, for example giving her firstborn black children worse food than the younger mixed-race children, and in so doing destroys her family and spirals herself into despair. Only decades later does she find her children and grandchildren, and particularly her daughter Maria das Dores, whom she thought had disappeared for good.

The story takes place in the Northern province of Zambézia, and is told looking back from the present day. The action takes place thirty years previously, still during the colonial times. Social problems, however, are not just down to colonisation alone, but also caused by the patriarchal structure which is increasingly evoked in myths tradition-conscious population. Instead of arguing the purity of black or white, Chiziane postulates on the affirmation of society’s mixture culture and an active adoption of the Portuguese language. As in earlier books, this author guides her readers through a world of traditional values and paints the captivating portrait of a collapsing society. Without using the methods of magical realism, she mixes mythical with real events and thereby creates a powerful, outlandish and incomparable work of poetic literature.

In 2002, Chiziane published her fourth novel, Niketche (Niketche is the name of an erotic love dance). Rami has been married to Tony, a senior police officer, for twenty years and they have several children. Her nightmare begins when she discovers that she has been sharing her husband with other women and their families. She subsequently tries feverishly to get to know these women and in doing so experiences to her great pain what it means to come up against ancient habits and customs and the enormous gulf between North and South in her country.

What do monogamy and polygamy mean? Are they products of culture, institutionalisation, hypocrisy, indolence or convention, or is it a matter of a person’s nature, intellect or emotions whether he or she adopts the one or other lifestyle?

Like in her former novels, the author leads her readers adeptly through a world of traditional values, drawing an exciting, compelling and also a humorous portrait of a society in the process of change.