All titles - Books From Spain

    PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE GRUPO EDITORIAL

    Your Results(showing 10)

    • Fiction
      January 2020

      All This Exists

      by Íñigo Redondo

      The revelation debut of 2020. This is a novel about the unexpected places where one can find refuge. This is the story of a man and a girl whose paths cross when life turns its back on them. Alexei is forty years old and the headmaster of a school in a Ukrainian city. His wife has just left him, and his days follow the same unchanging pattern: at night he drinks until he passes out, and during the day he fights to hide his pain and misery at the school. From the window of his office he observes the students at playtime and starts to pay attention to a girl who is always alone. He soon learns that her father beats her, and she asks him for help and together they decide to stage their disappearance: Irina will spend the two years until she comes of age at Alexei’s house. They spend the time playing long games of chess and listening to the radio which becomes the girl’s only link with an outside world that is witnessing the collapse of Communism. Those four walls that contain all the cold and all the chaos of a lost man will be the witness of this unexpected thaw while Alexei and Irina face the multiple facets of their relationship: the girl’s fear that her mother is suffering, the awkwardness he feels before an adolescent girl who will soon be a woman, the paternal instinct that has emerged unexpectedly, the incipient rebelliousness of a sweet and clever young girl or Alexei’s affectionate attempts to give the girl space for intimacy and self-discovery. Life goes on outside the confines of Irina’s world, outside that impossible bubble, and nobody can guess what is hidden behind that cold window of that grey block of flats on that frozen street of a town that the world could barely place on a map. Nobody is aware either that the existence of the two is contained within a limbo that distances the misfortune of their arrival in that space that separates a question from its answer. When a nuclear accident that will go down in history forces them to evacuate the city, they will have to finally face up to the question that has pursued them for almost two years: Do they want to return to the real world? This is the story of a meltdown, a mutual fascination, about the unthinkable places where we find refuge; it is about two hurt animals who invent a world where it is possible to believe that everything will be better some day.

    • Fiction
      June 2020

      Ava in the Night

      by Manuel Vicent

      The Franco regime, cinema and Hollywood glamour all combine in an explosive mix where fiction and reality intermingle in a story set against the backdrop of Spain’s recent history. A young man leaves his hometown and family and heads to Madrid to fulfil his dream of becoming a film director. After arriving in the capital, he heads to the School of Cinema, intent on passing the admission tests which include, in addition to an exam, the creation of a screenplay. This will be his gateway to a glittering universe, full of light and glamour, extraordinarily free. Because in 1950s Francoist Spain, beneath the black, sad and repressive veneer of the toughest years of the dictatorship, there lay a whole new world of art, cinema and literature where the joys of life could be enjoyed under the cover of nightfall.

    • Fiction
      February 2020

      Earth

      by Eloy Moreno

      The problem of finding the truth is not knowing what to do with it. A story that will change the way we see the world. A bestselling author who touches the most sensitive nerves.  A group of people live together in a nameless place. Why are they there? How did they get there? And above all, who are they? Or who have they become? We know nothing about them. Just what their actions tell us. In a lawless world, where everything that made up society has disappeared, what is left of us? A story full of unknowns, of big questions about the world we live our lives in, that asks us if the things we think are important really are. The author’s major themes are feelings, absurdity, society, and the importance of following our dreams.

    • Fiction
      March 2020

      Hannah

      by Christian Galvez

      Florence under the Nazis. Two timelines. A palindrome that joins two generations. An unknown hero. A story based on real events Florence, 1944. German consul Gerhard Wolf, the Guardian of Ponte Vecchio, saved the lives of hundreds of Jews during the Nazi occupation, kept the Germans from stealing the artworks in the Uffizi gallery, and saved Ponte Vecchio from being destroyed by mines. Florence, 2019. Hannah returns to Spain from Florence because her grandmother, Hannah, is dying. With her will go one of her deepest secrets: how she lived through the Nazi occupation of Florence in 1944. Hanna will find a Wehrpass, a Nazi passport belonging to a soldier who died in combat in 1943, and next to her grandmother’s name, she sees the text: “Hannah, girl number 37. G. Wolf.” Why did her Jewish grandmother’s name appear in a Nazi passport?

    • Fiction
      June 2020

      How I Killed My Father

      by Sara Jaramillo Klinkert

      Following It Would Be Night in Caracas comes the latest revelation in Latin‐American literature: an astonishing first novel based on true events. “When I was eleven years old, a hitman killed my father. I was just a young girl, who never thought something like that could happen. But it happened. It still pains me to think that just thirty‐five grams of steel and a gram of gunpowder was enough to end a family. I witnessed it. It ended mine. However, some thirty years later, here we are: with a dead father and a whole host of questions that nobody’s been able to answer. We’re still afloat, although we’ve been close to shipwreck many times. There’s two less crew members now, because one of my triplet brothers was also killed. This is the story of my family. To write it, I had to resurrect my father; and so this is also the story of how after his death, I had to kill him again to heal myself: a death impacts those who are left, not those who die. Because burying the body of a father to five children is by no means the end of a tragic story, rather only the beginning. I killed my father so that he could live forever in this book.”_Sara Jaramillo Klinkert A stunningly powerful tale in the context of normalized violence in Colombia, and the devastating impacts it carries on the lives of the individuals and families trying to live through such turbulent times.

    • Health & Personal Development
      October 2020

      Optimism and Health

      What science knows about the benefits of positive thinking

      by Luis Rojas Marcos

      Learning to feel and think positively is a highly profitable investment to overcome pessimism and live healthy and happy. In this book, psychiatrist Luis Rojas Marcos details the ingredients that distinguish the optimistic from the pessimistic disposition. He explores the forces that forge our temperament, identifies the most damagin poison to optimism, describes strategies to promote a positive disposition, and examines the influence of optimism in relationships, health and work. He ends with an analysis of the most valuable quality of our optimism: its enormous and proven usefulness in dealing with adversity in life.

    • Fiction
      January 2019

      Paper & Ink

      by Maria Reig

      The thrilling story of a woman who fights to rise up to the Establishment settled in Madrid before the Spanish Republic. Upstairs Downstairs. A love story full of obstacles. Madrid. Beginning of the 20th century. Elisa is raised by her wealthy bourgeoisie godmother. The feeling of belonging nowhere and a sense of rebellion mark her life. She will not only seek to run away from the limits imposed to women, through journalistic writing and passing herself off as a man, but she will also fight to take control of her life and give herself up to love. A strong and resolute female character, who will fight for her freedom, in a journalistic world ruled by men, in a convulsive period for Spain. A sublime portrait of Madrid, in a twenties setting: the perfect start of the 20th century environment.

    • Fiction
      June 2020

      Postcards from the East

      by Reyes Monforte

      A paean to liberty, identity, and hope in the middle of one of the greatest human catastrophes of our history. Madrid, 1980. A woman receives a box of postcards and photos of people she doesn’t know. “These are the postcards your mother wrote when she was in Auschwitz.” In these letters, she will discover the secret that her mother, Elle, kept for thirty-five years: that she was a prisoner of the Nazis and kept texts and photographs from the women in the concentration camp. She wanted to write their stories. One of them is Maria Mandel, a real person, the cruelest and most bloodthirsty SS woman, who lived during the Third Reich, and who would take Elle on as her reluctant protégée. Josef Mengele, Heinrich Himmler, Irma Grese, Ana Frank, Alma Rosé, and Gisella Peri also make their appearance.

    • Fiction
      May 2020

      The Avenue of Illusions

      by Xavi Barroso

      From a servant in an upper-class home to a Vaudeville star. A woman ahead of her time. A stirring and turbulent story of an era. Francisca and María arrive in Barcelona, capital of Vaudeville and anarchism, to work as servants. Francisca has an indomitable character. She dreams of being an artist with a freer life than society has destined her for. She will soon meet Joan, a young anarchist who will steal her heart and reveal to her the magic of Paralelo, the theater-lined avenue. Francisca’s loyalties will be tested in a revolutionary Barcelona with a flourishing theater scene. Strong of character, committed to women’s suffrage and workers’ rights, she will also see the darker side of the city, the humiliation, solitude, betrayal, and unrequited love, but none of this will keep her from success and fame.

    • Humanities & Social Sciences
      October 2020

      The Day After the Great Epidemics

      From the Bubonic Plague to the Coronavirus

      by José Enrique Ruiz‐Domènec

      How have societies dealt with the "day after" the great epidemics?From the Plague to the Coronavirus, the response of humanity throughout history In extreme situations, human beings need answers and we look back in history for information. The five moments covered here were key episodes in which the challenge of a major epidemic was followed by a judicious response that opened up a promising future. An epidemic comes when you least expect it, but we are not the first to have suffered one, and history offers us excellent examples that we must take into account when redirecting our situation. The bubonic plague of 542 in Constantinople, the great epidemics brought to the Americas in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, or the Spanish Flu of 1918‐1920 generated a health crisis that is familiar to us today. In these episodes, wise and unwise decisions were made, but in the end societies showed they were up to the task. Today the challenge is set, and history can help us find intelligent and creative solutions that lead to a promising future.

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