The past is something that captivates writer and reader in equal measure. And in years of change like the ones we are experiencing, it doesn’t hurt to remember it and revisit it. This need may be one of the main reasons why several titles from very different publishers have decided to undertake this journey through time. Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, for example, explores the first Franco era with very diverse characters in Castillos de fuego (Seix Barral). A turbulent time that recalls one of the most atrocious periods in the history of Spain at peace.
The same dark era, alternated with the present, is remembered by the cartoonist Paco Roca and the journalist Rodrigo Terrasa in their latest graphic work, El abismo del olvido (Astiberri Ediciones), with which they denounce the mass graves and other atrocities committed in the disputes and with which they vindicate the eternal search of some people to provide dignity to their loved ones after death.
The Northern Irish author Maggie O’Farrell moves to a very different, but also bygone, era. After the international success of Hamnet (2021), she decides to write The Married Portrait (Asteroid Books / L’Altra), about Florence. of 1560 to embrace the third daughter of the Grand Duke Cosimo de Medici, forced to marry.
In the field of essays, the trend continues with the help of Timothy Garton Ash, who in Europe: A Personal History (Taurus / Arcàdia), has traveled and documented the annals of the old continent of the last forty years in order to have a vision clearer about the present and the future.
In the narrative in Catalan, Sergi Pàmies also allies himself with memory in A les dues seran les tres (Quaderns Crema), where a faithful commitment to both the past and fantasy can be seen. Two terms that offer endless possibilities. The author provides historical events and private anecdotes, in which there is no shortage of tenderness and irony, and which aim to put together a solid story with which to reflect.
The following 30 titles have been chosen based on their literary quality – not their success or popular impact – and feature both established authors, such as Antonio Muñoz Molina or Mario Vargas Llosa; as with young promises already established. headed by Irene Solà. or debutants who arrive on the literary scene in a big way, like Bonnie Garmus.
1. Maggie O’Farrell. The Married Portrait (Libros del Asteroid / L’Altra)
Maggie O’Farrell (Coleraine, 1972) made a name for herself on the international literary scene with Hamnet (2021). Now, having become a consolidated brand, the Northern Irish author returns with another historical novel, The Married Portrait. The woman of the title is actually a 15-year-old girl, Lucrezia, the third daughter of the Grand Duke Cosimo de Medici, who in Florence in 1560 is forced to marry Alfonso, 12 years older than her, the firstborn of the Duchy of Ferrara, an ambivalent man, with lights and shadows, driven by the obsession of producing an heir. The book alternates short chapters in which Lucrezia’s hours end with longer ones that evoke the past. All narrated in present tense. O’Farrell thus immerses herself in the psyche of a perceptive woman, with artistic gifts and married to a man who is an enigma.
2. Hernán Díaz. Fortune (Anagram / Periscope)
New York, 1920s. The stock market rises. Then comes the crack. Díaz has won the Pulitzer with this amazing novel that demonstrates how the story changes depending on who tells it.
3. Joseph O’Connor. Wandering Kings (Impedimenta)
“Almost all bands start with camaraderie, but it is difficult to maintain it.” This is what happened to Ships in the Night, famous in the eighties, forgotten in the 2000s.
4. Bonnie Garmus. Chemistry lessons (Salamander)
Elizabeth Zott, a single mother, is a television star despite herself. Her true calling is chemistry. A fun and moving feminist statement.
5. Giuliano da Empoli. The Wizard of the Kremlin (Seix Barral / Editions 62)
Literature and geopolitics go hand in hand in this sociological portrait that helps understand post-Soviet Russia and Vladimir Putin’s regime.
They voted: Xavi Ayén, Lara Gómez, Leonor Mayor, Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, Antonio Lozano and Anna Guitart
1. Ignatius Martinez of Pison. Castles of Fire (Six Barrel)
There are many novels that exist about the Civil War, but not so many that focus on the years immediately after the war, the most atrocious in the history of Spain at peace. It was that fact that caught the author’s attention and encouraged him to write this choral portrait of Madrid during the first Franco era, in which there is no shortage of hunger, violence, repression, shootings and uncertainty. Martínez de Pisón invites the reader to closely follow characters as unique and accurate as a neighborhood movie blockbuster who ends up in a brothel, a crippled young man who ends up as a guerrilla, a Falangist who traffics and enriches himself with objects confiscated from the Reds. or a former communist who ends up joining the police to work as a torturer. Alternate stories of people from the regime and the resistance that help draw a map of what Spain was at that time.
2. Antonio Muñoz Molina. I won’t see you die (Seix Barral)
Who said that love passion has an age? Gabriel and Adriana lived a great love story. Five decades later, they meet again.
3. Laura Ferrero. The Astronauts (Alfaguara)
Autobiographical novel that investigates the mysteries of that family that the author never had. A search that arises after finding a photograph in which she appears as a child with her parents.
4. Mario Vargas Llosa. I dedicate my silence to him (Alfaguara)
A musical party to celebrate the writer’s latest novel, which focuses on a man with an unbridled passion for Peruvian popular music.
5. Basilio Baltasar. The Apocalypse according to Saint Goliath (KRK Ediciones)
A boxer, a homeless man, a therapist and a manager wander through the underworld and tour the setting of masterpieces of painting.
They voted: Xavi Ayén, Lara Gómez, Leonor Mayor, Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, Laura Freixas and J.A. Masoliver
1. Sergi Pamies. At two it will be three (Quaderns Crema)
Sergi Pàmies (Paris, 1960) takes another step in experimenting with the limits of genres, between the story and the chronicle, in which the reader is not clear what is fiction and what is not, something that for the writer has no importance. As he himself explained in an interview in this newspaper: “It is as if he had recovered the most experimental toolbox.” In the book we find everything from a lot of memories of the Paris of his childhood to a kind of chronicle extracted from a trip to London a year ago, through the evocation of another trip, now to Quebec, in the company of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, or the story in which he narrates his unexpected relationship with the guitar, a gift from his mother because she cannot buy him the clarinet that he would have wanted. As Julià Guillamon has written: “Fiction, invention, fantasy are part of autobiography.”
2. Irene Solà. I gave you eyes and you looked into the darkness (Anagram)
Publishing after Canto jo i la muntanya balla was a monumental challenge, and Solà succeeds with a feast of language that explores a day that lasts centuries.
3. Monica Batet. A story is a stone thrown into the river (Angle)
A great novel with a rondalla tone about a Folklorist, a Revolutionary and a daughter who will become the Listener of Songs.
4. Imma Monsó. The Teacher and the Beast (Anagram)
Severina, who has received a very particular education from her mother and has a father who is a clandestine anti-Franco militant, arrives to a high mountain town to be a teacher.
5. Nuria Chains. Tiberius Caesar (Proa)
Cadenes novel with literary ambition the biography of the Roman emperor Tiberius Caesar, with all his complexity and his shadows, with a language that draws on the classics of Bernat Metge.
They voted: Julià Guillamon, Llucia Ramis, Magí Camps, Anna Guitart, Gemma Sardà, Xavi Ayén, Miquel Molina, Francesc Bombí-Vilaseca and David Castillo
1. Timothy Garton Ash. Europe: A personal story (Taurus / Arcadia)
Timothy Garton Ash (London, 1955) has documented live European history of the last four decades from his dual role as historian and journalist. Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, he has traced in his books a history of the present that he now summarizes in Europe: A personal history, a book in which the history of the old continent of the last four decades is mixed with his personal experiences. , from his meetings with the people of the towns that have changed their name and country again and again in Eastern Europe to a conversation with Putin in 1994 that shows that his post-imperial ambitions were already early. “The world around us has changed. Instead of following Europe to become an example of multilateralism and multilevel postnational governance, we are competing with great powers, China, Russia, the United States, Turkey, Brazil, India or South Africa,” explained the author in an interview with La Vanguard.
2. Simon Sebag Montefiore. The world (Criticism)
The world told through their families, the powerful ones. The Medici and the Trumps. The Kennedys and the Habsburgs. The Fujiwara, the Muhammad or Genghis Khan.
3. Frank Dikötter. Dictators (Cliff)
The history of the 20th century can also be told from its dictators. Dikötter has chosen Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung, Duvalier, Ceau?escu and Mengistu. But there is more.
4. Mar García Puig. The history of vertebrates (Random House / La Magrana)
Mar went crazy when her twins were born. She healed by writing the stories of many other women who also went crazy as mothers.
5. Byung Chul Han. Contemplative life (Taurus / The Pomegranate)
There is a Korean who has the world in his head. His name is Byung-Chul Han and his philosophy dissects the evils of current capitalism like few others.
6. Rafael Argullol. Human Dance (Cliff)
A book that is 11 books. Each one of them is structured with a conversation/presence, both real and unreal, that places us in front of a mirror that gives us back an unprecedented image of ourselves.
7. Sonia Devillers. Those exported (Impedimenta)
Jews exchanged for pigs. Devillers shows in The Exported how Ceausescu sold thousands of Jews and remembers the atrocious Shoah that the country perpetrated.
8. Javier Gomà Lanzón. Concrete Universal (Taurus)
Within philosophy, two very different souls have historically coexisted in permanent conflict: a literary soul and a scientific soul. Which of the two will last?
9. Q. Monzó / S. Pàmies / J. Guillamon. If our memory does not fail us (Libros de Vanguardia)
Julià Guillamon interviews Monzó and Pàmies, two great writers who share memories and complicities.
10. May Lahoz. Destiny and Memory (Tusquets)
The exciting life of Jorge Semprún from the Nazi camp to the Ministry of Culture told by Jordi Amat, Benito Bermejo, Reyes Mate and Anna Caballé among others.
They voted: Miquel Molina, Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, Leonor mayor, Justo Barranco, Laura Freixas and Judit Carrera
1. Paco Roca and Rodrigo Terrasa. The abyss of oblivion (Astiberri Ediciones)
Cartoonist and journalist travel to the past in their latest work and strive to tell the true stories of Leoncio Badía, a republican forced to work as a gravedigger; of José Celda, shot and buried in a common grave along with eleven other men on the back wall of the Paterna cemetery, like so many tens of thousands of Spaniards who were savagely retaliated by the Franco regime and of Pepica Celda, who had eight years when her father José was killed and now, now in her eighties, she hopes to recover his remains to restore her dignity. A complicated but not impossible search thanks to Badía’s hidden messages among the corpses, convinced that one day someone could get them out of there. A labyrinth that aims nothing more than to unravel the miseries of a country obsessed with despising its memory.
2. A. Altarriba, S. García and Lola Moral. The sky in the head (Editorial Standard)
After surviving a collapse in a coltan mine, Nivek will embark on a journey that is inspired by that of thousands of African immigrants heading to the coasts of Europe.
3. María Medem. Because of a flower (Blackie Books)
The towns have emptied. Except one, in which a young woman lives along with dogs, geckos and a flower that remembers better times.
4. John Garnido and John Diaz Channels. Blacksad. Everything falls. Part 2. (Editorial Standards)
Second part of the seventh album by the detective cat. The return of Alma Mayer has turned John Blacksad’s life upside down.
5. Cristina Durán, Miguel Á. Giner Bou. María the Javelin (Astiberri Ediciones)
The winners of the National Comic Award dedicate their work to María Pérez Lacruz, the last one murdered by the Franco regime in the Valencian Community.
They voted: Jordi Canyissa, Lara Gómez, Xavi Ayén, Francesc Bombí-Vilaseca, Justo Barranco and Mery Cuesta