The Wonders
'Delicate but strong' Hilary Mantel
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- USD 8.99
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- USD 8.99
Publisher Description
'Mesmerising. Medel's prose is hypnotic - it's hard to believe this is her first novel.' Avni Doshi, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted Burnt Sugar
'A serene and impious novel that puts class, feminism and the eternal complexity of family ties at the fore' Mariana Enríquez, author of the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
AN AUDACIOUS, HEARTBREAKING DEBUT ABOUT WORKING-CLASS WOMEN'S LIVES ACROSS TWO GENERATIONS, HERALDING A NEW EUROPEAN LITERARY STAR
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 her family was brought low by 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.
WINNER OF THE FRANCISCO UMBRAL PRIZE
'Very rarely do natural talent, linguistic discipline, and emotional rawness coincide... unfolds a history of crude intimacies, subtle roughness and luminous sadness' Andrés Neuman, author of Traveller of the Century
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanish poet Medel's remarkable English-language debut moves from Francoist Spain into the present day, tracing a family's fractured ties over three generations. In 1969, María is forced to leave her hardscrabble Córdoba home when she gets pregnant by a married man at 16. After handing over infant Carmen to her family to care for, she moves to Madrid and makes do with backbreaking menial jobs. Her efforts to send money home while saving enough to bring the child to live with her fail, as do her attempts to forge a long-distance maternal bond. By the time she can afford to have Carmen join her in the 1980s, the teenager refuses. As a young woman, Carmen marries a restaurateur and raises her daughter, Alicia, in comfort until the crippling debts her husband's incurred drive him to suicide and the family into poverty when Alicia is 13. Like María, Alicia moves to Madrid, where she drops out of school, enters a dull marriage, works dead-end jobs, and carries on a generally self-destructive lifestyle. She's also haunted by dreams about her father's death, which become stranger and more violent as time passes. She doesn't want to know María, the grandmother she was told abandoned their family, while María has too little information to find Alicia on her own. By 2018, a women's support group that María has helped build organizes a women's march that crosses through Alicia's neighborhood, increasing the chance their paths will cross. Arresting characterizations and vivid prose fuel Medel's searing look at the impact gender, class, and financial hardships have on working-class Spanish women's lives as the country is buffeted by wider cultural shifts. It adds up to a powerful story.
