In a few days, the novelties of the literary rentrée will begin to drip, that is, the avalanche of titles that follows the summer holidays. Publishers have programmed several of their main dishes in Spanish, such as the new novels by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Ildefonso Falcones, Santiago Lorenzo, Sara Mesa, Enrique Vila-Matas or the posthumous work of Almudena Grandes. These are some of the most anticipated books.
Everything is going to get better (Tusquets, October 11) is the dystopian novel that Almudena Grandes (1960-2021) left “practically finished”, according to the publisher. It is set in the near future, in a Spain affected by a pandemic in which a new political movement called ¡Soluciones Ya!, won the elections, led by a peculiar successful businessman who, among his measures, created a new security force or limits internet access. A group of ordinary people will dare to dismantle his lies. An additional piece of information: Grandes’s widower, Luis García Montero, dedicates the poems of One Year and Three Months (Tusquets, September 14) to him.
Adventure lovers have their date with Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Cartagena, 1951), who in Revolución (Alfaguara, October 4) travels to Mexico, to the times of Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa, in which he places a treasure of “fifteen thousand gold coins of twenty pesos of the so-called maximilians, stolen from a bank in Ciudad Juárez on May 8, 1911,” according to the author. The protagonist is a young Spanish mining engineer.
Ildefonso Falcones (Barcelona, ??1959) transports us, for his part, to slave-owning Cuba at the end of the 19th century in Esclava de la libertad (Grijalbo, August 30), through the character of Kaweka, a Guinean woman who fights for her emancipation in the Spanish colony, with the counterpoint of a contemporary plot –novelty in the author– set in the high business offices of Madrid.
Sara Mesa (Madrid, 1976) directs her chilling scalpel at the family institution, in a story that spans several decades and in which she shows the contradictions and weaknesses of a human group made up of a father, a mother, two girls and two kids. It is titled, of course, La familia (Anagrama, September 14).
Víctor Amela (Barcelona, ??1960) novel in Si yo me perdo (Destino, October 5) a little-known episode: the 98 happiest days in the life of Federico García Lorca, according to what he himself said, that is, those he spent in Cuba in 1930, where he had initially gone to spend a single week, after having been in New York.
One of the phenomena of recent years has been Los asquerosos (2018), by Santiago Lorenzo (Portugalete, 1964), who returns to the fray with Tostonazo (Blackie Books, October 5), starring a gray guy who works, first , as an intern in the shooting of a film in Madrid and, later, he goes to Ávila, a boring provincial city that, however, will change his life.
The grandmother’s suicide causes four granddaughters to come to town to inherit the house. It is the initial approach of Las herederas (Alfaguara, September 22) by Aixa de la Cruz (Bilbao, 1988), which crosses the stories and personalities of the girls: one recovers from a crisis, the other tends to spiritual retreats, the eldest is a cardiologist and is investigating the death of her grandmother, and finally another wants her camel to use the house as a warehouse.
One less protagonist, that is, three has La ciudad (Lumen, September 1), the new novel by Lara Moreno (Seville, 1978), which portrays, within the same building, a trapped woman (on the fourth floor) in a relationship that is a cage, to another that cares for the children of their employers (in the third), and to another that lives in the tiny house that is the gatehouse and scrubs the stairs.
Another bestseller who will be at the top of the rankings along with Falcones and Pérez-Reverte is Juan Gómez-Jurado (Madrid, 1977), who begins a new trilogy with Todo arde (Ediciones B, October 18), a thriller set in Madrid with female protagonists , three “very dangerous” women who have lost everything, including an evicted mother who wants revenge on the system.
But there is much more. Santiago Roncagliolo (Lima, 1975) will publish the stories of Lejos (Alfaguara, November 10); Enrique Vila-Matas presents us, in Montevideo (Seix Barral, August 31), a narrator in crisis; The trio of authors responsible for Carmen Mola publishes Las madres (Alfaguara, September 27), the fourth installment of their series on inspector Elena Blanco; Cuban Leopoldo Padura (Havana, 1955) recovers detective Mario Conde in Decent People (Tusquets, August 31), set in the Cuba of 2016 that welcomed Obama and the Rolling Stones; and Lorenzo Silva (Carabanchel, 1966) sends, in La llama de Focea (Destino, September 28), Second Lieutenant Bevilacqua and Sergeant Chamorro to investigate a murder on the Camino de Santiago.
Likewise, Luis Mateo Díez (Villablino, 1942) publishes My Crimes as a Companion Animal (Galaxia Gutenberg, October 26); Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince (Medellín, 1958) launches Except my heart, everything is fine (Alfaguara, October 13); the award for longest title goes to The Pursuit and Murder of the Mouse King Performed by the Sewer Choir Under the Direction of a Failed Writer (Cliff, November) by A.G. Porta (Barcelona, ??1954); and José Ovejero (Madrid, 1958) is the author of While We Are Dead (Pages of Foam, September 7).
