Read the World

Jardin junto al mar, Mercè Rodoreda (Spain)

Set in 1920s Spain, Garden by the Sea takes place over several summers at a villa by the sea inhabited by a young couple and their beautiful, rich, joyous friends. They swim, drink, tease each other, and fully enjoy themselves. All the while, the guests are observed by the villa’s gardener, a widow who’s been tending the garden for several decades. As the true protagonist of the novel, we get to see the dissolution of these magical summers through his eyes, as a sense of darkness and ending creeps in, precipitated by the construction of a new, larger, more glamorous villa next door.

Le dedico mi silencio, Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)

The most prestigious author in Spanish literature today returns with a novel set in his native Peru. I Give You My Silence is the story of a man who dreamed of a country united by music and went mad trying to write the perfect book to tell it.

Cómo maté a mi padre, Sara Jaramillo Klinkert (Argentina)

Thirty kaleidoscopic scenes make up this testimonial novel. In it we witness the murder of the narrator’s father through the astonished eyes of the girl she was. The novel asks and tries to answer a question that no one has been able to answer for her, her mother, or her siblings: Can 35 grams of steel and one gram of gunpowder destroy a family?

En el reino del toro sagrado, Jordi Soler (Mexico)

Artemisa, a beautiful woman of Greek descent, lives in a village lost in the mountain range of Veracruz, in a land between reality and myth where the primitivism of the jungle and western civilization coexist in a complex balance. There, everyone desires her, she is worshiped as a goddess, but any love affair with her is destined for tragedy: the story told by the narrator, when they were both young, and her story with a violent and powerful older man, who falls obsessively in love with her. Obsessive is also the sort of relationship established by Artemisa with a strange and fearsome being, an almost mythological animal to which she is apparently attached by an uncontrollable passion that hurtles her to an inhuman fate of betrayal and unimaginable horror.

The exotic and the primitive, the beautiful and the atrocious, Greek and Mexican pre-Hispanic mythologies intertwine in this novel, where Jordi Soler narrates—with magnetic prose, leaving the reader breathless—savagery and relationships of love and dependency that unleash a true tempest within the page.