“This is an old and wicked island. An island of Phoenicians and merchants, of
bloodsuckers and frauds.”

Ana María Matute’s 1959 novel is a powerful and unsettling coming-of age novel, set on Mallorca during the Spanish Civil War. It’s a stifling story of rebellious adolescence, narrated by Matia, as she struggles against her domineering grandmother, schemes with her mercurial cousin Borja and begins to fall in love with the strange boy Manuel. Steeped in myth, fairy tale and biblical allusion, the novel depicts Mallorca as an enchanted but wicked island, a lost Eden and Never Never Land combined, where the sun burns through stained glass windows and the wind
tears itself on the agaves. Ostensibly concerned with Matia’s anxieties about
entering the adult world, this internal confl ict is set against the much wider,
deeper, and more frightening confl ict of the civil war as it plays out almost
secretly on the island, set in turn against the backdrop of the Inquisition’s mass
burning of Jews in previous centuries. These two confl icts shimmer at the
edges of Matia’s highly subjective account of her life on the island, where life is
drawn along painful and divisive lines.