The Wonders
Elena Medel author Thomas Bunstead translator Lizzie Davis translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Pushkin Press
Published:30th Mar '23
£9.99
Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.
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 a family 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.
'The Wonders is a poet's novel, delicate but strong, impressing its images firmly on the imagination.' - Hilary Mantel
'A mesmerizing read. Medel's prose is hypnotic, it's hard to believe this is her first novel. I was completely engrossed in this story, in the shadow each generation casts on the one that comes after it, in the tension between caring for oneself and caring for others' - Avni Doshi, author of the 2020 Booker Prize-Shortlisted Burnt Sugar
'Completely unsentimental and with a harshness that hides the most radiant and painful of scars... brings to life several generations of working women: it's a serene and impious novel that puts class, feminism, and the eternal complexity of family ties at the fore' - Mariana Enriquez, author of the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
'Full of brilliant moments of illumination... The effect of [the book's] fragmentation is to make of these individual women's lives a collective picture of working-class Spanish womanhood. With light touches Medel conveys gradual but tremendous change... it has a boldly ingenious structure and flashes of beauty' - The Guardian
'A beautifully written novel that examines the lives of three generations of working-class women living precariously in Madrid' - Stylist
ISBN: 9781782276593
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
224 pages