The new literary season is coming strong in terms of translated literature releases. Along with blockbusters like the seventh installment of Millennium –now in the hands of Karin Smirnoff– or the fifth of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, titles by Jennifer Egan, Han Kang or Miriam Toews arouse expectation, as, of course, the novelization of the abuses that John Irving himself suffered as a child (a subject touched tangentially by Ian McEwan) or S., the surprising literary artifact that the filmmaker J.J.Abrams has concocted together with the novelist Doug Dorst, a tribute to the paper book with the Lost series as a reference. Fred Vargas fans have a new installment from Adamsberg. Big names like Antonio Moresco and Pascal Quignard aspire to expand their audience. And, as icing on the cake, there are still unpublished stories by Lucia Berlin (stories)
Jeff, son of the American Lucia Berlin (1936-2004), author of the celebrated Manual for Cleaning Women, has made this volume with fifteen unpublished stories in Spanish, as well as articles, essays and extracts from newspapers. Lucia Berlin, today a cult author, was a teacher, telephone operator, nurse or domestic employee and she wrote (and drank) when her children slept. October 26th
The new Korean novel –which caused a sensation with The Vegetarian (2007)– presents a young mother overwhelmed by the blows of life who suddenly loses her speech and decides, to recover it, enroll in an ancient Greek course , since in his native Korean “the bile in the back of the throat” blocks it. September 7th
The British, world king of the historical bestseller, returns to Kingsbridge with the fifth installment of The Pillars of the Earth. In 1792, England suffers a tyrannical government and the population lives in misery because of the new industrial machinery that leaves them jobless. September 26
The American offers a kind of sequel to Time Is a Scoundrel (2010), in which a technology company uses some professors’ downloadable memory experiments to create a social network that allows people to link their memories in a collective unconscious. Structured like a web of stories. September 7th
The Briton takes us to the 1980s, where Roland Baines –who as a child was bullied by his piano teacher– is abandoned by his wife, who leaves a note on his pillow: “I’m fine. It’s not your fault. I love you, but this is for the best. I’ve been living the wrong life.” We will witness his life and the great events of the 20th century. September 27th
The prolific master of American horror casts private detective Holly Gibney, one of his most beloved characters (who appears in the Bill Hodges trilogy and the serialized The Visitor), into the solo lead role. Here she investigates some mysterious disappearances in a midwestern town. September 21st
After Stieg Larsson and David Lagercrantz (with three titles each) comes the turn of Karin Smirnoff, the author who brings the seventh installment of Millennium to the north of Sweden, where Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander investigate a case between the multinationals that exploit the resources natural and mafia groups that inhabit the area. August 29
Adamsberg’s twelfth adventure, the policeman created by the French author, Princess of Asturias Award winner, who this time will go to Brittany, where an eccentric descendant of Chateaubriand is accused of a crime committed with a strange knife. November 8th
The American’s new novel stars a screenwriter, Adam Brewster, whose mother abused him when he was 13 years old. A secret that weighs on him, like Irving, who had something similar happen to him at the age of 11, with a woman friend of his mother. 4th of October
The work of the Canadian Miriam Toews delves into sentimental and family relationships. If in previous books she spoke of the autobiographical experience of a young woman who leaves an ultra-religious community, here the axis is the dialogue between a grandmother who in her day did the same and her 9-year-old granddaughter, expelled from school for fights. October 9
Climate change has reached the literature. The Scottish author joins names like Jens Liljestrand, Gabi Martínez or Richard Powers, with an ambitious work where the biologist Leigh searches for evidence of the first forms of life on Earth, which takes her from the oceans to the desert in an epic that will have even parts in space. October 12 °
The Russian Tamara Petkévich (1920-2017) was taken to the gulag in 1943 because she was the daughter of her father, who had died in one of them. This real testimony of her life there has been praised by international critics (even compared to Solzenitsyn), and reflects a daily life that includes horrible forced labor, malnutrition and sexual harassment but also happier moments when she worked as a nurse and actress. October 9
This contemporary classic, written in 1998, is the beginning of a trilogy that tells the story of a young man in three different and irreconcilable periods of his life. In the first part he is a silent seminarian. In the second, a revolutionary activist. And, in the third, an unpublished writer. The religion-politics-art triad as an explanation of everything. 11 of September
Three moments in the hectic life of Malika (the author’s mother), a Moroccan from the countryside, who is chaining resignations from the French colonization until the death of Hassan II. The novel develops relations of domination, the different social strata, the weight of history and that of a plural, obsessive and divided psyche. Taia was the first intellectual to come out of the closet in his country and his works deal with identity and power. September 13th
After her tetralogy of the seasons, the Scotsman tells the story, in Britain in the Brexit pandemic, of an artist who receives an unexpected call from a college friend asking for help with a strange question she was asked after spending half a year. day locked in border control. 4th of September
Originally published in 2005, this forbidden colonial love story that the Tanzanian Nobel laureate is now being translated is set in Kenya at the end of the 19th century, where an Englishman falls in love with the sister of a merchant, while he is being cared for by war wounds. History will repeat itself some time later, in the 50s, when Pearce’s brother falls in love with Rehana’s granddaughter. September 21st
The narrative artifact of the season. Filmmaker Abrams and novelist Dorst have created a meta-novel that is a “love letter to the written word”: two readers meet in the margins of a book and find themselves locked in a deadly struggle between forces they do not understand. The work poses games with hidden keys and includes comments by hand from readers. Winks at all of Abrams’ work, especially Lost. 30th of October
The Frenchman, newly awarded Formentor Award for his more than 50 books, is a unique author –he went through an autistic period and is a cellist– from whom this original work from 1979 comes to us for the first time, about a sad musician, in Paris , who remains silent while his friends –a collector of old books, a strict grammarian, a Chinese antiquarian, a philologist teacher, a music analyst…– try to cheer him up with banquets, concerts and discussions. November 15
Subtitled About the mystery of Stalin’s call to Pasternak, the Albanian author recreates a mythical episode that only lasted three minutes: the telephone conversation between the Soviet dictator and the writer in 1934. He offers several versions of this brief call and reflects on the relationship of the writers with power. Pasternak would end up rejecting the Nobel Prize in 1958. November
We dismiss these recommendations –not exhaustive– with the epistolary work of one of the three humanist pillars (with Dante and Boccaccio) of 14th century Italy. This volume –translated by Francisco Socas and revised by Jordi Bayod– includes family, old age, unaddressed and scattered letters. They are the best manual for understanding his work, his ideal of classicism and his involvement in events of the time. Some are addressed to contemporaries and others to personalities already dead. November
