Awards

• Winner of Basque Literary Prize 2020

Overview

Ismael, a successful novelist, has been suffering from writer's block for two years, trying to get inside his female narrator's head and failing. However, he tells no one about this problem and continues to spend each day in his study, supposedly writing. When his mother is taken into hospital, he is forced to spend time with his father who has the beginnings of dementia. This experience carries him back to a moment in his childhood that has remained hidden away in his memory until then. Jasone, Ismael's wife, has always been his first reader and editor. As a student, she used to write, but has devoted the last decade of her life to her daughters and to her husband's career. Now that the girls have left home, Jasone finds herself drawn to ideas and causes she believed were the domain of her best friend Libe, as well as to an old flame, who is also her husband's publisher. The rape of a young woman in a nearby town triggers something in Jasone, and she begins spending her nights at her computer writing a novel she never expected to write. When the couple's respective secrets are revealed, everything will change. With intelligence and wisdom, Karmele Jaio brilliantly dissects the complexities of relationships of all kinds, never coming down on one side, but allowing her characters space to evolve and take up roles of their own making. AUTHOR: Karmele Jaio Eiguren (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1970) has written three collections of stories, three novels and a book of poetry. She writes in Basque and translates her own work into Spanish. Her first novel, Her Mother's Hands, appeared in English in 2018, and has since been made into a film. Her stories have appeared in various anthologies, including Best European Fiction 2017 and The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories (2022). Her work has already won her several prizes, most recently the 2020 Basque Literary Prize for My Father's House.

Full Product Details

9781915568083

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Reviews

'There is a story, the story of Ismael and his struggles, of Jasone and her struggles and the stories of the other characters but, above all, this is a superb feminist novel.' John Alvey in The Modern Novel

Author Information

Karmele Jaio Eiguren (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1970) has written three collections of stories, three novels and a book of poetry. She writes in Basque and translates her own work into Spanish. Her first novel, Her Mother's Hands, appeared in English in 2018, and has since been made into a film. Her stories have appeared in various anthologies, including Best European Fiction 2017 and The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories (2022). Her work has already won her several prizes, most recently the 2020 Basque Literary Prize for My Father's House. Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers and has won many prizes both in the Uk and the US. In 2013, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in 2014, was awarded an OBE for services to literature. In 2018, she was awarded the Ordem Infante D. Henrique by the Portuguese government and a Lifetime Award for Excellence in Translation by the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in New York. Sophie Hughes is the translator of over twenty books from Spanish, by Spanish and Latin American writers including Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán, José Revueltas, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize for Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor.

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