A TIMID LIGHT

(SPAIN: CATALAN)

Àfrica Alonso (Barcelona, 1995) graduated as an actress from the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, where she took her first steps in the performing arts, play writing and production. After taking part in several musical, theatrical and television shows, she premiered the first play of her own in 2020, Una luz tímida, which has been successfully staged for four seasons at the principal theatres of Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid.  The play was inspired by the true story of two women in Francoist Spain and also provides the basis of her first novel, Una luz timida, published by Seix Barral (Spanish) and Empúries (Catalan) in 2024.  @AafricaAlonso

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A beautiful story of impossible love. Two women united forever in the wrong epoch.

Drawing on her own highly successful theatre play, which was based on a true story that shocked public opinion at the time, Àfrica Alonso has now rewritten it as a novel.

At the height of the Franco dictatorship, in a small Valencian town, two teachers, Isabel and Carmen, fall in love and begin a furtive affair, at a time when lesbianism was considered immoral and criminal and therefore almost unthinkable. Isabel is mature and brave, she has cut ties with her family and accepts herself just as she is. Carmen, on the other hand, is fragile and dependent.

When Carmen’s family finds out about this forbidden love, they intern her in a clinic to cure what they consider to be a deviance. Carmen will be a victim of inhuman abuse that will tragically mark the fate of a relationship doomed by its very nature, condemned by the family and society in a country stained by moral corruption.

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“In the midst of the need to strengthen the rights and visibility of the LGBTQ+ community, works such as A Timid Light remind society of why we should never forget history and much less go back.”—Cinemagavía

“A tribute to the historical memory of lesbian women.”—El Nacional

“A powerful, heartfelt, and brave work that gives visibility to a part of the LGTBIQ+ community.”—En Platea

“Ensuring the official narrative is fair and not always told by the victors. Creating culture is this: questioning the prevailing system.”—Directa.cat

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 For rights information, contact Laura Palomares at Agencia Carmen Balcells: l.palomares@agenciabalcells.com

ORCHESTRA

(SPAIN: SPANISH)

Miqui Otero debuted in 2010 with the acclaimed novel Hilo musical (Alpha Decay, 2010), winner of the FNAC New Talent Award, and two years later came La cápsula del tiempo (Blackie Books, 2012), Rockdelux book of the year. He has written regularly in media such as El País and Cultura/s La Vanguardia and is now a columnist for El Periódico. He also teaches journalism and literature at the UAB. With Rayos (Blackie Books, 2016), celebrated by the critics as the new "great novel of Barcelona", he established himself as one of the most outstanding and imaginative voices on the Spanish literary scene. In 2020 he published Simón (Blackie Books, 2020), an ode to the novel, which won the Ojo Crítico Prize and appeared on all the best-of-the-year lists of the main Spanish titles, as well as winning the favour of the public and critics and several international editions, including Italian and French.  His latest novel to date is Orquesta (Alfaguara, 2024), an impressive novel as mystical as it is joyful. @MiquiOtero

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“There is silence, so there was music. There is death, so there was life. There is nobody, so everyone passed through here. The whole story in one night and the whole world in one place.”

Dawn in Valdeplata after the summer festival. The grass is littered with dead starlings, a torn ticket, a red bicycle, a trainer covered in blood. The orchestra played all night and the young and the old danced to the same songs, keeping different secrets. They were kept by the Count, an old man who could die at any moment (and with him an ancient world of magic and fear). And by Ventura, a lorry driver who finally took out his sequined dress, and by Placeres, dreaming of revenge and forbidden loves. They danced and they drank and they seemed to understand each other, old lovers, mortal enemies, lost youths. This story is told by the Music, which is inside and outside of each of them, as well as you. Music that reminds the living that they are alive, and summons the dead.

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“An electric tale written with magic and precision.” Carlos Zanón, author of The Ghost of Johnny Tapia

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 For rights information, contact Marta Gonzalez at MB Agencia Literaria: marta@mbagencialiteraria.es

BAVISPE

(MEXICO: SPANISH)

Carlos René Padilla first saw the lights of the patrol cars in Agua Prieta, Sonora, in 1977. His earliest crime was studying Communication Sciences at the University of Sonora. ​He won the Sonoran Book Contest 2015 in the novel genre with Amorcito Corazón (NITRO/PRESS, 2016) and the Premio Nacional de Novela Negra: Una vuelta de tuerca in 2016 with Yo soy Espáiderman, published under the title Yo soy el araña by Reservoir Books in 2019. His most recent book, Bavispe, is a collection of short stories exploring themes of machismo, criminality, gender violence, migration and nostalgia for rural life in Sonora. The collection was awarded the José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature in 2022. He has three more titles stashed away in his safe: El cielo se cambió de dirección (short stories), Renuencia al destino (poems) and Un día de estos, Fabiola (novel). He has worked for the newspapers Expreso and El Imparcial, where he won a prize for "In-depth Journalism" from the Inter-American Press Association. He is currently under 'house arrest' in Ciudad Obregón, where he cooks for his wife and daughter, writes, and at night escapes to La Taberna de Moe, a bar where they say he’s never paid for a single drink. @carlos_rene_padilla / @carlosrenepadil

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As is the case in hundreds of Mexican towns —especially those stranded in the middle of the desert—, if you were to ask someone who isn’t from the region where Bavispe is, they might reply that they heard the name once, but they probably wouldn’t be able to pinpoint its location. It seems that in order for many of these towns to properly exist in the national imagination, they need a true bard that will make them his own, who will extract the passions, fears, desires and beliefs of the inhabitants, and use his words to put them on the map.

​This is exactly what Carlos René Padilla has done in the tales contained in Bavispe, a title that captures the history and the stories of that little town crushed by the oppressive heat and apparent monotony, transforming them into unforgettable narratives inhabited by ghosts and living beings ready to snatch any sense of calm from us as we read.

​In the manner of the finest composers of smalltown ballads, Padilla’s narration uses language that is often poetic but at the same time rooted in orality, a rhythm that is maintained from the beginning to the end of every piece. The book presents a variety of rural dramas ranging from ghosts roaming the streets to violent vengeances, from irony to a flirtation with the absurd, from love to hate, in a close, organic and cohesive universe: that of the town itself over the years.  ​- Eduardo Antonio Parra

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 For rights information, contact Fernanda Meixueiro at VF Agencia Literaria:  foreignrights@vfagencialiteraria.com

a mother’s voice

(argentina: SPANISH)

Silvia Arazi (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a novelist, short story writer, poet, actress and singer. She has acted in many plays, films, comedies, musicals and television programmes. As a writer, she formed part of the Abelardo Castillo workshop for several years. She was awarded the 1998 Premio Julio Cortázar de Narrativa Breve in Spain for her short stories Que temprano anochece. Her novel La maestra de canto was translated into German and Dutch and it was adapted into cinema by Ariel Broitman, in 2013. She has published two poetry books: Claudine y la casa de piedra y  La medianera, una novelita haiku  (Second Prize of Argentina’s National Endowment for the Arts) and La familia Cubierto, poems for children. Her most recent novels are El niño de pocas palabras and La separación. She lives in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and in Colonia del Sacramento (Uruguay).   @silvia_arazi \\ facebook.com/silvia.arazi

“It was a warm, bright morning, with a clear blue sky that I interpreted as a promise, as a good omen for the year that had just begun. As soon as I wrote the final words, my phone rang. It was my sister, telling me that my mother had died.”

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Rosa, Rosita, is a beautiful, gentle, melancholic woman, who in her old age suffers a slow and prolonged deterioration. The narrator, her daughter, helplessly observes this painful process. She visits her, listens to her, reads to her, tries to make her laugh, sings to her. When her mother dies, she feels the need to write about her. These pages narrate Rosita’s past, how she met her husband and created a family, with everything this implied for many women at the time in terms of being relegated and silenced. In writing about her, the narrator encounters, as if looking in a mirror, her own childhood, her youth, her first loves, her lack of desire to have children, and her strained relationship with her father.

“One of the greatest new Latin American storytellers.” 
- Augusto Roa Bastos

 This is a grief memoir, a love song: a stunningly intimate novel about the end of a mother’s life told though the eyes of her daughter, and about the lacerating emptiness of that absence. It is about how for the daughter, a “prisoner to words”, the act of writing is her only means of tackling a subject of this magnitude. In the words of the narrator, these are “pages I write slowly, simmering away between long valleys of silence, with the only desire being, perhaps, to remember that voice.” This is a story of mourning, of intense bonds, and above all, a moving tribute to a mother’s love.

The form of the novel reflects the narrator’s grieving process: it is fragmentary, with minimalistic chapters oscillating between the first and third person as her memories are explored and her mother is immortalised in these short glimpses. In a narrative style reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, this is a novel in which the voice prevents another voice from being forgotten, inferring that something immense and sacred is at stake here, that our existence in this world also relies on the way in which we articulate our past, and that our own identity is at risk of shattering if we do not protect the pieces that make us who we are.

As Silvia delves into her childhood memories, we fall in love with Rosita. We watch her in the kitchen as she prepares Arabic delicacies. We listen to her requesting her favourite songs in a whisper. We spy on her as she rests on her bed, worried we might disturb her. A Mother's Voice is not only a precious tribute to a departed loved one, it is a portrait of a whole generation of women who did not believe they had a voice, but with love and hope, they raised daughters who managed to empower themselves.

In trying to write the story of a mother, the novel also becomes the story of a family. When the narrator’s siblings find out she is writing the book, they ask her not to talk about certain subjects, to which she responds: “I also try to explain that each of us lived in a different house, in a different family, even though we had the same parents and lived under the same roof.” Arazi explores the idea of perception and memory, and the nature of truth in writing itself: can anyone be satisfied with the written word? Are there true facts, or does the very act of narrating something therefore obscure it, destroy it? “Diving into memory is like diving into a deep sea in the middle of the night, among fish, weeds and sea monsters,” she writes. Her examination of words, of language, reflects her grieving process and how, through writing, she gives form to her mother, gives her a voice. The narrator is trying to use her words to give name to something that is unnameable. “The pain is a blood clot. It is silence. It is a non-word.” Although every word hurts, Silvia sits down to write and is able to transmute all her grief. Beyond being a literary gem, A Mother's Voice is pure healing.

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“A remarkable novel, rooted in the elusive evocation of the past without ever drowning in the sadness of loss... On the contrary, it leaves the reader with the feeling that whatever is lost does not vanish altogether but is a place that ruminates vaguely and abstractly in the least visited recesses of the mind. There is a way to that place, and that way is fiction.” Debret Viana, Página 12

“Arazi's writing is graceful: it subtly allows for tenderness but does not shy away from the pain; instead tackling it head on. [...] Even when she smiles, even when she sings, even when she strolls through the square with her mother or has a lively conversation with the manager of her building, underneath there is always a tear. A tear that glistens, that names and describes, in simple and precise words, something that in the beginning could not be named.”
Mauricio Koch, Fundación La Balandra

“‘The pain is a blood clot. It is silence. It is a non-word.’ This fragment by Silvia Arazi sits on my chest and like a mussel, slow and precise, it digs down until it has rooted itself into my heart. It hurts, yes, but I can’t help but take pleasure in such beauty. A moving book. A gem.” Paula Castiglioni, Becult Magazine

“An intimate and poetic story that seeks to reconstruct the family memory and includes intense reflections on writing, the human voice and its power to reveal our most hidden thoughts.” Rocío Ibarlucía, La Capital Newspaper

“Silvia Arazi - an exceptional author who manages to penetrate the depths of the soul as if she were describing a Japanese landscape. When I read her, I constantly have the impression of being both a spectator and part of her stories. As a reader, she doesn’t demand commitment from me, she doesn’t ask me to take her side, she respects my rhythm and, when I least expect it, I am inside her words.” Luciano Luterau, Infobae

“In this intimate and intimate novel, everything is expressed with an exquisite cadence, with a prose that caresses and almost whispers, so characteristic of Silvia Arazi’s literature. As if she were singing an a cappella song with her delicate voice. Because it is also about the voice. To hear that voice, to listen to it, to make sure it is not lost forever, to treasure it.” Silvia Renee Surer, Perfil Newspaper

“The preoccupation with what the words say - worthy of a disciple of Abelardo Castillo - puts this novel in the category of an essay, and adds reflections that flesh out the facts being narrated.”  Leticia Martin, Polvo Magazine

“A Mother’s Voice deals with a sensitive subject matter: the history, the progressive deterioration and, finally, the pain of the absence of her mother, Rosita. A text that makes use of the devices of fiction and manages to get to the core of a pain as real and lacerating as the loss of a loved one.”  Monica Lopez Ocon, Tiempo Argentino

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For rights information, contact Laura Palomares at Agencia Carmen Balcells: l.palomares@agenciabalcells.com

This translation sample received financial support from Translation House Looren.

THE FALLING LIGHT
(SPAIN: SPANISH)

Adolfo García Ortega (Valladolid, 1958) has lived in Madrid since 1982, though he now divides his time between this city and Barcelona. He has been involved in the world of books and literature since 1980, as translator, literary critic, journalist (El País), and editor. As writer, his works enjoy the highest reputation. He has written the novels Mampaso (1990), Café Hugo (1999), Lobo (Wolf, 2000), El comprador de aniversarios (The Birthday Buyer, 2003), Automata (Automaton, 2006), El mapa de la vida (Life’s map, 2009), Pasajero K (Passenger K, 2012) and El evangelista (The evangelist, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016). In 2019 he has published the novel Una tumba en el aire, winner of the XII Malaga Novel Award and in 2021, La luz que cae. Some of his works have been translated into English, Italian and Hebrew, among other languages.

The Falling Light is the new literary game from Adolfo García Ortega: an unclassifiable author, and one of the freest spirits in contemporary Spanish literature.

A transformative, free and very personal book that will stay with its readers forever.

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This is a truly unique and unexpected book. On a recent trip to Japan to give lectures, the author came into contact with the ideas and figure of Hiroshi Kindaichi, an unusual 18th century Japanese thinker. Kindaichi, almost unknown until the current day, was a Shinto heretic who confronted the society of his time and was a pioneer in dialogue with nature and the spiritual wonder that nature itself emits. In Japan, aided by a specialist in the heretical world of Kindaichi, García Ortega undertook an inner journey and discovered the life and ideas of this enigmatic figure shrouded in secrecy. A hybrid genre book, in that, in the manner of Borges, it combines essay and novel, La luz que cae finally opts for fiction. Its pages contain travels and translations through time, narrating the vicissitudes of Kindaichi’s life, his reflections and adventures, relations between Japan and Holland, the ideological tensions of a country that was fairly closed off from the 18th century up until the Hiroshima catastrophe, Kindaichi’s unusual stay in the Europe of Diderot and the French Revolution and, finally, a vibrant hymn to nature in which the reader is invited to an emotional encounter with himself.

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“A book that can produce the sensation of having reached total clarity or of having fallen into absolute shadow; of having understood everything or of having understood nothing, which in Shintoism is the same thing. What remains is the sensation of a pleasurable reading experience, as gripping as a thriller and as alienating as a good poem.” Iñaki Ezkerra

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“A writer must have courage. In my books I have looked for a kind of justice, that concept of reparation. But who am I to repair? I don’t do it, but the book does.” García Ortega on García Ortega.

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For rights information, contact Nuria Cicero at Galaxia Gutenberg: ncicero@galaxiagutenberg.com

RETURNING TO CANFRANC
by Rosario Raro
(SPAIN: SPANISH)

Rosario Raro (Segorbe, Spain, 1971) holds a PhD in Hispanic philology and is a lecturer in Spanish language and creative writing at the Jaume I University of Castellón. She also holds a postgraduate degree in business communication and another in pedagogy. Her work has been translated into Catalan, Japanese and French and acclaimed by numerous literary awards. She lived for a decade in Lima, Peru. Twelve editions of her novel Volver a Canfranc (Planeta, 2015) have been published so far. Furthermore, this book reached the finals of the Valencian critics' awards and the production company Diagonal TV has acquired the audio-visual rights for its adaptation to the screen.

The story of a legendary train station that changed the course of a  war.

March 1943. Crouched in a secret room, several people hold their breath as they wait for the sound of the steel toe-capped boots of the German soldiers to recede. At the international station of Canfranc, in the Pyrenees (Spain), the swastika flies over the railway. In the darkness, Laurent Juste, head of customs, Jana Belerma, hotel maid, and bandit Esteve Durandarte risk their lives to give them back their freedom. 

Return(ing) to Canfranc is their story. Jana and Esteve, armed only with the courage of love, fought so that thousands of Jewish citizens could pass through the legendary station. They were joined by many other generous people who decided to face down terror and offer their help. For thousands of people persecuted by the Nazi regime, hope was called Canfranc.  

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 “This novel captivated me: it retrieves a part of our past that deserved to be recounted.” Luz Gabás

“One of those novels that is more than a novel.”  Benjamín Prado

“Extraordinary.” Marta Robles

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For rights information, contact Laura Palomares at Agencia Carmen Balcells: l.palomares@agenciabalcells.com

THE WOMAN WE ARE
BY EMMA DERUSCHI
(FRANCE: FRENCH)

Emma Deruschi lives in Paris where she works as a copyright lawyer. After many years of writing for herself, The Woman We Are is her first novel.

“The more we look at our loved ones, the less we see them…”

A stunning first novel, with a unique heroine.

A physical therapist, wife and mother living in Paris – Elisa’s life is not very different from that of millions of other women. She’s surrounded by friends, who are warm, lively and caring, who share tales of their daily struggles and victories. But nobody notices that despite this material comfort, these friends and family, Elisa is facing her own challenge, one that is quietly wearing away at her.

Told in turns by those lively women in Elisa’s life, the novel gives us a many-faceted view of Elisa and her quest for a new beginning. And with the final chapter of The Woman We Are, it becomes clear just how much Elisa’s struggles mirror and echo with those of so many others.

For rights information, contact Helena Sandlyng Jacobsen at Susanna Lea Associates: hsandlyngjacobsen@susannalea.com

SMOKE
BY José OVEJERO
(sPAIN: Spanish)

José Ovejero (Madrid, Spain, 1958) has written novels, short stories, essays, plays and poems, and regularly contributes to Spanish and Latin American magazines and newspapers. He has lectured and taught writing courses at universities in several European and Latin American countries. He was awarded the Anagrama prize for his essay La ética de la crueldad and the Alfaguara prize for his novel La invención del amor. His work has been translated into several languages.

A post-apocalyptic story possessing a rawness and sensitivity comparable to Cormac McCarthy's The Road 

A woman and a child survive in a secluded cabin in the woods. He is not her son and they hardly know each other. If she has taken him in, it is because neither of them has anyone else. The world has become an appallingly hostile place and any visit can carry a threat, whether it be a mother begging for food for her sick children or a stranger posing as an ally. Whether to trust other people or not has become a matter of life and death.

Humo [Smoke] is a moving, powerful tale about the struggle for survival in a crumbling world, where nature offers the only refuge to survive the death throes of civilization.

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“With its precise prose, sculpted in marble, Humo is an extraordinary story of life and survival, of the affections that shape the most urgent aspirations of our days. Nature in all its wild and human dimensions. José Ovejero never disappoints.” Agustin Fernandez Mallo 

"A beautiful fable about the tenacity of human nature, about the strength of our deepest animal side, and also about the endurance of tenderness in a hostile environment.” Sara Mesa

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For rights information, contact Laura Palomares at Agencia Carmen Balcells: l.palomares@agenciabalcells.com

WEST END
BY José Morella
(sPAIN: Spanish)

José Morella (Ibiza, Spain, 1972) holds a degree in literature theory and comparative literature. He entered his novel Asuntos propios for the Premio Herralde, and although it did not win, the judging panel gave such a positive assessment of the work that it was published by Anagrama. His novel Como caminos en la niebla, explores the wild and rebellious life of the psychiatrist, anarchist and hippie avant la lettre, Otto Gros. West End was awarded the 2019 Café Gijón Novel Prize. José Morella lives in Barcelona.

Winner of the 2019 Café Gijón Novel Prize

Inspired by his childhood memories of Ibiza’s West End in the 1970s and 80s, on a corner of the island inhabited by working families emigrated from Andalusia, hippies from around the world, and tourists looking to party, José Morella reconstructs the difficult life of his grandfather, Nicomedes, who suffered from mental illness. Morella delves into his family’s history and the combination of fear, lack of understanding, and shame that led them to build a wall of isolation around his grandfather.

With a heterogeneous mix of genres, from his own family stories and autofiction to essay, Morella offers an energetic and electrifying lesson in humanity and compassion. Drawing on testimony, personal experience, nods and references from throughout the cultural spectrum, this book is an unforgettable read.

A lesson in humanity, as moving as Awakenings by Oliver Sacks, as real and desperate as life itself.

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“José Morella writes with poetic simplicity, and his anti-solemnity is a lesson to be followed.” —Elena Poniatowska, Winner of the 2013 Cervantes Prize

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For rights information, contact Laura Palomares at Agencia Carmen Balcells: l.palomares@agenciabalcells.com

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARY MAGDALENE
BY CRISTINA FALLARÁS
(sPAIN: Spanish)

Cristina Fallarás (Zaragoza, 1968) is a journalist and writer. She has received several awards for her journalistic work and is known for her defense of women’s rights and political activism. Among her published works of fiction, one should mention Rupturas (Urano, 2003); No acaba la noche (Planeta, 2006), Así murió el poeta Guadalupe (Alianza, 2009), Las niñas perdidas (Roca, 2011 – L’H Confidencial Award 2011 and Hammett Award 2012), “Últimos días en el Puesto del Este (DVD, 2011; Salto de Página, 2013 – Ciudad de Barbastro Award for Short Novel) and the celebrated novel Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre (Anagrama, 2018). Her non-fiction works include A la puta calle (Planeta, 2013), the brave first-person testimony about an eviction and Ahora contamos nosotras. #Cuéntalo: una memoria colectiva de la violencia (Anagrama, 2019), which collects testimonies of several women who have suffered sexist violence.

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Cristina Fallarás writes on these pages a great work of fiction, inspired by scripture and historical documents but also with a truly realistic and contemporary approach. The result is a valiant and sensual portrait of a free woman, whose role in the foundation of Christianity has been systematically erased by the Church powers. Because every story is true but only some of them actually happened.

The novel is told through the voice of Mary Magdalene, an old woman that remembers her time with Jesus Christ and the chain of events that created one of the most powerful icons in Human history. Through the novel we will discover that her role was in fact instrumental and that maybe the last days of Jesus are not exactly what we think we know so well.

Mary Magdalene is Jesus’ closest companion and eyewitness to the day-to-day wonders Jesus performs with those who suffer, his interaction with disciples and even his agony on the cross. Her voice shines a light on the story and everything becomes a much more clear and full human experience. Are there miracles? Who multiplied the five loaves and two fish? Who healed the sick? Did Jesus actually rose from the dead? Mary answers these and many other questions. Her account will impress and surprise all kind of readers.

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“Fallarás vindicates Mary Magdalene’s story with narrative intelligence and a remarkable historical expertise. Fallarás offers a daring and provocative novel, but also a chance to reflect on the fruitful role of women during early Christian times. Highly recommended!” - Anna Caballé, El País

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For rights information, contact: rights@mbagencialiteraria.es

YOU’RE VERY QUIET TODAY
BY ANA NAVAJAS
(Argentina: Spanish)

Ana Navajas is an Argentinian novelist. She grew up in the province of Corrientes and returned to the capital to  study Communication at the University of Buenos Aires. She currently teaches Creative Writing in Buenos Aires where she lives with her family.
Her literary debut novel Estás Muy Callada Hoy was published to much acclaim by Rosa Iceberg in 2019.

“When I got home, I went out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette. I like that you can no longer smoke inside. I like smoking to suspend time while daily life carries on.”

In the wake of her mother’s death we follow the narrator’s life in Buenos Aires, and her occasional trips to the provinces to visit her father, who now lives alone in the house where she grew up. We see her in different roles: as a mother of three, a wife, a daughter, a sister, but now also as a motherless child. But who is she when she’s by herself, without having to take care of anyone else? Who is she when she has no role to fulfil, when she stops serving the needs of the people around her?  She is very quiet today, but her silence is filled with words. Beneath the stillness there is this grief: alone, she struggles to find her own voice. She seems to be telling us: let me be quiet, I am living. She is demanding to be allowed to feel things in her own way and at her own pace. And in doing this, she reveals humour, an endless curiosity towards the enigma that is her children, and her memories of a childhood spent in the sticky heat of rural Argentina.

You’re Very Quiet Today is a deeply atmospheric and beautifully observed debut novel. It is a stunning work of autofiction that shows the complexity of the female voice and the telling weight of silence. 

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 “Ana's voice is a hum that appears in the background of a familiar landscape and shifts my focus. I listen to her narrating things I've already seen, but never like this, not the way she portrays them. This novel has a few central themes, but it is not those themes that I am drawn to: I am drawn to that hum, which takes me by surprise and tells me, reminds me, that even in the closest, most recognisable landscapes, there is still something I missed.” - Margarita García Robayo

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For rights information, contact Lisette Verhagen, at Peters Fraser + Dunlop: lverhagen@pfd.co.uk

tHE Fire Woman
BY ASYA DJOULAïT
(france: FRench)
(co-translated with hANNAH Rácz-Embleton)

Asya Djoulaït was born in Paris in 1993 to Algerian parents. She teaches literature at a high school in the Parisian banlieues. At the age of 25, Djoulaït wrote her first novel, Noire précieuse, published by Gallimard (2020).  She won the Sorbonne’s ‘Prix de la Nouvelle’ short story prize, and the Prix du jeune écrivain [Young Writers Prize]. She was also shortlisted for the Société des gens des lettres (SGDL) Prix Révélation for the First Novel award. 

“Trembling, Céleste gathered up what little courage she had left to study her mother’s hands as they tucked her in. They moved like a lie being formed, a coffin being sealed shut. The hands brought Céleste out of her childhood. They were wood fire, churned up by lava, marked by flames, streaked with grey and shame.”

This is the story of a mother who flays her own flesh in an attempt to find her place in society. It is centred around the relationship between a young girl and her mother, a story of Black, French identity, and of the modes of communication circulating in the streets of Paris’s 18th arrondissement, between Château-d'Eau and Boulevard Saint-Germain. In Noire Précieuse, the creole language Nouchi meets the "French of the whites" and seeps into Ivorian slang. Inspired by the Greek tragedy Medea, Noire Précieuse is the story of a relationship that is as sensitive as a caress, as violent as an identity imposed from the outside, and has the power to stir the reader’s blood. This story is first and foremost one of culture shock between Africa and France, of a conflict of identity that plunges its protagonists into a complex state of ambivalence. Oumou, who has destroyed her skin in her attempts to make it lighter, and who intends never to set foot in Africa again, dreams of success and integration for her daughter. But she is as afraid of seeing her marry a white man as she is of her attachment to her Ivorian roots. Céleste seems to be on the cusp of a promising career, but this makes her hesitate all the more between two continents and two worlds, as she prepares for the split between her working-class background and the Parisian intellectual elite.

“This is Asya Djoulaït's tour de force: showing how questioning our identity does not mean simply abandoning one way of life for another, but embracing everything that is around us and within us.” - Le Monde

“A relevant, refreshing read, this first novel captures the inner journey of an unforgettable heroine with joyful empathy, and the journey of so many young French people of African descent.” - Le Monde

“In 160 absorbing pages, Noire précieuse takes a walk through the Château Rouge district in the north of Paris, with jubilant language (Ivorian French) and identity issues that are more than skin-deep: in 2020, can you be a gifted young black girl in 2020 and fall in love with a quintessential white French boy like Grégoire without asking questions about colour?” - RFI

“The charm of this delightful novel lies above all in the language, which constantly shifts between the formal French of the Parisian bourgeoisie who Celeste rubs shoulders with at the Henri IV high school, to the popular language of Paris’s "Little Africa": a French mixed with the lively, lilting forms of Ivorian and nouchi slang [...] Between Paris and Abidjan, Sciences-Po and Cocody, two worlds meet. Each learns from the other in a stirring and fiery back-and-forth, since both mother and daughter are endowed with the two qualities that make everything possible: love and understanding. In their own way, both women have plenty of love to give. Though the journey isn’t easy, together, they keep moving forward.” - Sylvie Sagnes, Onalulu

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For rights information, contact Anne-Solange Noble at Gallimard: Anne-Solange.Noble@gallimard.fr

i am someone
BY aminata aidara
(france: FRench)
(co-translated with Eve anderson)

Aminata Aidara (1984) is an author of Italian and Senegalese origins. She grew up in Italy and now lives in Paris. She studied French literature at the University of Turin and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Her thesis (2016) focused on the writings of young French people with an immigrant background, viewed through literary anthropology. As a result of this, she set up a literary project, Exister à bout de plume, which further led to a literary competition and publishing writings by young people with an immigrant background. Since 2009, she has published short stories written in either French or Italian, and in 2014 won the prize Premio Chiara inedita 2014 for La ragazza dal cuore di carta [The Girl with the Paper Heart]. She works for the magazine Africulture, writing literary critiques and conducting interviews. She often appears on TV5Monde to present her work. Je suis quelqu’un (Gallimard, 2018) is her debut novel, and she is currently working on a sequel. www.aminataaidara.com

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A secret haunts the members of a family scattered between France and Senegal. But one day in June, the silence is broken. We enter what appears to be a family saga. The starting block is a reflection on family origins, and the study of the ruin of a family now dispersed. From the onset, we are privy to a family secret revealed to Estelle by her father, on her twenty-sixth birthday, in a bar in Paris: the birth of an illegitimate child back when they all lived in Dakar. It is the secret of a whole family. A secret so heavy that it has drowned under the weight of time and of the unspoken.

From there on, a quest for truth begins and different voices unfurl, chiefly the voice of the mother, Penda, who confides in a personal diary, and the voice of her daughter Estelle, opening with a two-part, third-person prologue: the start of their respective journeys from Other, to a freer and empowered I. In turn, each character untangles the threads of time, unveiling the historical injustices that map their intimate lives. We wander through the affluent areas of Dakar where dramas unfold, but never leave the front gates of the villas. We also weave our way through the suburbs of Paris, its estates and squats devoid of faith or laws. Ultimately, we learn that the secret is the family’s redemption.

 “A beautiful and sensitive story written in a poetic language… an engaged young writer. When reading Je suis quelqu’un we do notice that [the author does not] just talk about this family but that, through it, [she] talk[s] about the history of Senegal, its colonial past, and the domination still practised by former colonial countries on the African Continent.” -- Guillaume Richez, Les imposteurs

“The originality of this novel also rests in its fragmented structure. The author has chosen a polyphonic narrative where voices and points of views come together to tell about the world… this plurality of voices makes the anaphora of identity, chanting the narrative,  echo with renewed force starting with the title… Aminata Aidara is ‘someone’ whose name we should remember.” -- Tirthankar Chanda,  RFI Afrique

 “In Senegal, in France, wherever they live, the protagonists in Je suis quelqu’un are looking for roots – and find themselves. A beautiful first novel…[It] is not just a puzzling tale, and even less a family saga. The secret is just a way to set in motion a reflexion on dual identity and the multiple quests which we inherit: looking for origins, a place to return to, a way of living with history’s injustices and silences.” -- Gladys Marivat, Le Monde Livres

“Aidara calls upon great post-colonial thinkers to back the existentialist questions of her polyphonic novel…Searching for the Self, stumbling, finding the Self. Maybe. Finally. In Je suis quelqu’un, Aminata Aidara’s beautiful first novel…, the reader is transported to the heart of the internal journey, the quest for a Self and truths, from various members of a Senegalese family settled in France. It all starts with a family secret each member carries, sometimes without even knowing it…Hybridity, dual identity, Africanisation, uprooting… Je suis quelqu’un is skilfully militant without ever being Manichean.” --Assiya Hamza, France 24

“Estelle’s disarray faced with her troubled family, faced with her own existential suffering, is expressed through cathartic deliriums which make up the most beautiful pages of this poetic novel: quasi-Rimbaudian. Estelle’s monologues are read like pieces of urban poetry tempoed by the chorus ‘I am someone’… A poet is born!” -- Tirthankar Chanda, RFI (Radio France internationale)

 
“Through fiction, [Aidara] immerses us in both pleasure and reflection: expanded by knowledge without lesson…The young novelist offers, without writing an essay about it, wise, open-ended reflections… And this is reason enough for this novel to be read.” -- Christiane Chaulet Achour, Diacritik

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For rights information, contact Anne-Solange Noble at Gallimard: Anne-Solange.Noble@gallimard.fr

daughter of the east
by clara usón
(spain: SPANISH)

Clara Usón (Barcelona, 1961) was a practising lawyer for 20 years, keeping her secret vocation of writing on the backburner. She was awarded the Biblioteca Breve Prize for Corazón de Napalm, a novel that lies halfway between historical essay and ction, also highly praised by the critics. With La hija del Este (Daughter from the East), sold for publication in 7 languages, Clara Usón became the first woman to win Spain’s National Critics Prize after it was awarded to men for 40 consecutive years.

Why did Ratko Mladic’s daughter commit suicide?

Beautiful, intelligent and outgoing, Ana has a bright future ahead. She is the best medical student in her class at Belgrade University, and the pride and joy of her father, the Serbian general Ratko Mladic, whom she adores. One night, after a trip to Moscow, at the age of 23, Ana Mladic takes her father’s favourite gun and makes a decision that will change her family’s life forever. What happened in Moscow? Did Ana see the other side of her father, her hero, regarded by many as a war criminal? The tragedy of Ana Mladic adds a familiar, real, and intimate dimension to the terrible drama of the war in the Balkans, Europe’s most recent conflict which forms the background of this absorbing novel.

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“To the foreign reader this book will explain what happened here in the ‘90s with a lot of credibility, while those who witnessed the events will be able to assess the author’s passion for research and her skills as a writer, both of which this journalist considers excellent.” —Boris Pavelić, Zadarski list, Croatia

“A magnificent literary text in which past and present are merged wisely, encompassing a century of confrontations, disgrace and crimes through the painful experiences of the elusive, enigmatic protagonist.” —Juan Goytisolo

“Few cases such as that of Ana Mladic reflect the full immensity of a fate that no human being can avoid: the loss of innocence.” —Ana Maria Moix

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For rights information, contact Laura Palomares at Agencia Carmen Balcells: l.palomares@agenciabalcells.com

therapeutic feminism
BY MARíA FORNET
(SPAIn: SPanish, NON-FICTION)

María Fornet is a psychologist, writer and feminist. In recent years she has worked in London as a training and development manager for an NGO that supports women. While in London, she also served on the steering committee of an association committed to women’s empowerment and dealing with gender-based violence. Her training in psychology has focused on the field of psychological coaching, narrative psychology and gender perspective. She has learned from the top professionals in London, pioneers and founders of the discipline at international level. As well as helping women to achieve a fuller life, she writes books featuring female protagonists trying to carve out  their place in the world. Therapeutic Feminism is her first work of non-fiction, and draws on all of her experience as a psychologist, as a feminist, and above all, as a woman.  

María Fornet brings together psychology and gender perspective in this empowering journey through the most healing aspects of feminism.

A book that invites us to express a freer, more authentic version of ourselves, it reflects on the major themes shared by psychology and feminism: identity, the importance of language, the notion of beauty and the myth of romantic love, among many others.

Increasingly, women are speaking out against a society that oppresses them, casts them out of the public space and dictates a series of tastes and behaviours for them. In this context, the psychologist and writer María Fornet, who specialises in coaching with a gender perspective, proposes combining feminism and psychology to help women reclaim their place in the world. This idea is based on the belief that the gender approach can liberate and heal women who are experiencing specific problems as a direct consequence of the limitations that gender socialisation imposes on them, the oppression they suffer and the expectations imprinted on them by certain educational patterns. Throughout the book, the author will attempt to untangle this web of limitations, which has created a wall and blocked the ability of women to see beyond it.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part contains interesting self-discovery exercises and techniques to help us reconnect with ourselves, to help us understand who we are and what is important to us. The second part dives deeper into the theory of feminism to understand how certain social imperatives and dictates have pushed women to relate to themselves and the world the way they do. The journey culminates in the third stage, which encourages the reader to internalise what they have learned, in order to express a freer, more authentic version of themselves.

Therapeutic Feminism aims at recognising inequality and using different techniques for women to find their own voice. An empowering journey that combines self-discovery, creativity and narrative, drawing on important female figures such as Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Melanie Klein and Margaret Atwood, to help us reflect on, enjoy and transform our own lives.

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For rights information, contact the author: mariafornetlibros@gmail.com