A01=Elena Medel
Annie Ernaux
Ariana Harwicz
Author_Elena Medel
Category=FBA
Category=FYT
class
class and gender inequality
class struggle novel
contemporary Spanish literature
Cristina Morales
decades spanning narrative
Easy Reading
Elena Ferrante
Elena Medel
Elena Medel novel
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
family history and memory
feminism in Spain
feminist novel
Franco era to modern Spain
grandmother and granddaughter narrative
intergenerational story
intimate social commentary
Irene Sola
literary feminism
literary fiction in translation
Lucia Berlin
lyrical political fiction
Madrid working class women
money
Olga Tokarczuk
poverty
Spanish literary fiction
The Wonders
translated literary fiction
When I Sing Mountains Dance
women in translation
women's economic precarity
women's inner lives
working class women's lives
Product details
- ISBN 9781782276593
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 30 Mar 2023
- Publisher: Pushkin Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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María and her granddaughter Alicia have never met. Decades apart, both make the same journey to Madrid in search of work and independence. María, scraping together a living as a cleaner and carer, sending money back home for the daughter she hardly knows; Alicia, raised in prosperity until a family tragedy, now trapped in a poorly paid job and a cycle of banal infidelities. Their lives are marked by precarity, and by the haunting sense of how things might have been different.
Through a series of arresting vignettes, Elena Medel weaves together a broken family's story, stretching from the last years of Franco's dictatorship to mass feminist protests in contemporary Madrid. Audacious, intimate and shot through with razor-edged lyricism, The Wonders is a revelatory novel about the many ways that lives are shaped by class, history and feminism: about what has changed for working class women, and what has remained stubbornly the same.
Elena Medel was born in Córdoba in 1985 and lives in Madrid. She is the author of three poetry collections and two works of non-fiction. At 19 she founded the poetry publishing house La Bella Varsovia, one of the most prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world. She is the recipient of the XXVI Loewe Prize for Young Poets, the Princess of Girona Foundation Arts and Literature Award 2016 for the whole of her work and the Francisco Umbral Prize for the Best Book Of The Year 2020. The Wonders is her first novel, and will be translated into thirteen languages.
