The Wonders: 'Delicate but strong' Hilary Mantel
About this ebook
'Full of brilliant moments of illumination... a boldly ingenious structure and flashes of beauty' GUARDIAN
'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.
PRAISE FOR THE WONDERS
'An ambitious and enlightening book from an acclaimed Spanish poet' The Irish Times
'A beautifully written novel that examines the lives of three generations of working-class women living precariously in Madrid' Stylist
At just over 200 pages, The Wonders is a novel that doesn't waste a single word, instead basking in all the linguistic pleasures of great poetry' Sunday Business Post
'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
'One of Spain's best poets has become one of its most important novelists' El País
About the author
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 Belle 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 fpr 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.
Thomas Bunstead is a writer and translator. His recent translations include The Things We've Seen by Agustín Fernández Mallo, which was the recipient of a PEN Translation Award, and Water Over Stones, a co translation with Margaret Jull Costa.
Lizzie Davies is a translator and an editor at Coffee House Press. Her recent translations include My First Bikini by Elena Medel and Ornamental by Juan Cárdenas, which was a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize.
