In Spanish The best books of 2020
International Best Books of 2020
You will never be a true Gondra
Borja Ortiz de Gondra. Random House Literature.
Russian novelon, self-fiction and political testimony, all at the same time, about the drama of a Bilbao man who left the Basque Country due to national pressure and the intolerance of his environment, which does not allow him to live his sexuality freely.
After the years, the character returns home and all the witnesses of the lead years try to convince him that none of this happened.
Monday they will love us
Najat el Hachmi. Destination.
A neighborhood on the outskirts of the outskirts, two Moroccan migrant families and two girls willing to challenge the destiny written for them.
One will try to be free through knowledge and culture.
The other, through an overwhelming vitalism.
Only one of the two will be able to overcome the pressure and misunderstanding of their community.
The death of Murat Idrissi
Tommy Wieringa. Random House Literature.
A good read to complement Najat El Hachmi's novel.
Its protagonists are also two girls, daughters of Moroccan emigrants in Europe, free and defiant.
One summer they travel to Africa to experience the
Arab
dolce far niente
.
When they return, someone pressures them to take a clandestine immigrant in their car.
And there the drama begins.
The ungrateful
Pedro Simon. Espasa.
The second novel by the EL MUNDO journalist moves away from the chronicle and delves into the intimate memory: rural Spain of the 70s, the freedom of peoples, immigration to the city, the
Delibean
characters
, the love and care that no one thanked ... They are the ingredients of a childhood that the character of
Los ingratos
is only able to appreciate when he says goodbye to her again.
Sira
María Dueñas.ÁNGEL NAVARRETE
Maria Dueñas. Espasa.
The characters of
The Time Between Seams
reappear 12 years later in a kind of adventure blockbuster that travels through Palestine, London, Madrid and Morocco and that sometimes takes on environments typical of
the Alexandria Quartet
and, sometimes, those of a Javier novel Marias.
All in a structure in the style of
The Three Musketeers
.
The Duchess of Windsor
Diana Mitford. The Sphere of books.
Wallis Simpson, the woman whose marriage to the heir to the United Kingdom crown destabilized the politics of the empire on the eve of World War II, is here delicately portrayed by the no less controversial Diana Mitford, the most mysterious and perhaps sinister of the famous Mitford sisters.
The gospel
Elisa Victoria. Blackie Books.
The summer of the Expo and the years of the real estate bubble mark the time arc through which the characters of Elisa Victoria move: girls a little misplaced, university students unable to connect with the world that surrounds them, employed in jobs to use and pull, families exhausted in the fight for their survival ... Characters all determined to seek some form of purity.
Thomas Nevinson
Javier Marías. Alfaguara.
Tomás Nevinson, a secondary character from
Berta Isla
, offered Javier Marías the thread to pull until he built an extensive spy novel full of moral dilemmas that connects ETA with Northern Irish terrorism and that, in some way, seems related to the trilogy of
Your face tomorrow
.
Human sacrifices
María Fernanda Ampuero. Foam Pages.
The writer of
Cockfight
, a small
best-seller
of the most transgressive narrative, presents here a new batch of stories dedicated to evil: psychopathic murderers of women in the tradition of Norman Bates, natures that take revenge on humans, devils who are they mock mortals in the parking lots of shopping centers, droplets of tropical gothic ...
Death in his hands
Ottesa Moshfegh. Alfaguara.
The mold of the detached, lazy, depressed character without much drama, a bit comical, a bit sad and a bit rebellious at the same time, that Moshfegh built in
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
reappears here as a 72-year-old lady who, in her longing to be left alone, she becomes the detective in a strange crime novel.
Sons of February
Alan Parks. Tusquets.
If the crime novel of our time could be synthesized in a perfect model, the stories of Detective McCoy (
Sons of February
is the second in the series) would be close: corruption, politics, insanity, sexism and a lot of lives Anguished they are locked in a plot full of baroque nooks with the Glasgow of the 70s as the setting.
The gospel according to Mary Magdalene
Cristina You will fail. Bruguera.
The Magdalena de Fallarás is not a prostitute, among other things, because there is no historical source that suggests it.
Her fame, says the author, is a conspiracy that concealed a strong and independent woman.
In her literary portrait, the new Magdalena is a
successful, challenging and sexually liberated
bourgeoisie
who intellectually chooses goodness.
Salvatierra
Pedro Mairal SERGIO GONZÁLEZ VALERO
Pedro Mairal. Asteroid Books.
Pedro Mairal's novels are charming: apparently simple, narrated with a clear and humorous voice, like that of a friend who tells an anecdote, but secretly loaded with sadness and wisdom that leave their mark.
Long before
La uruguaya,
Mairal wrote
Salvatierra
, a rural story about art, parents, and life's disappointments.
Klara and the sun
Kazuo Ishiguro. Anagram.
Klara and the sun
are many things at once.
At first, it seems like a story about children's pets talking to their owners in the Georgian style;
later, it becomes a fable about artificial intelligence, about the eternally postponed death that our world dreams of, and about our world's fear of great technological change.
Minimalist prose and something very moving at the heart.
You have to look
Anna Starobinets. Impedimenta.
Anna Starobinets, world-renowned Russian horror author, came across the most heartbreaking story of her career in real life.
She became pregnant and learned that her son had malformations that would prevent him from living.
What followed was not just a classic duel, but a harrowing escapade between arrogant doctors and clinics like castles of vampires.
The story, curiously, has a wonderfully comic part.
Colonial memories notebook
Isabel Figueiredo. Asteroid Books.
Another first-person account signed by a woman.
This time, the setting is the city that was called Lourenço Marques, present-day Maputo, remembered for the daughter of a Portuguese electrician, a charismatic and brutal target in colonial Mozambique.
The most moving pages are those that relate the sad return of the protagonist to Portugal.
Half ghost
Alan Pauls. Random House Literature.
Reading
The Phantom Half
is a good challenge for readers who almost 20 years ago were stunned by
The Past
.
Here is the same obsessive and sly inquiry into a character who appears to be a man without attributes (or with attributes a bit absurd) and who is only revealed in his truth when he falls in love.
Although that truth is a bit sinister.
Dam
Ayaan Hirsi Ali.BERNABÉ CORDÓN
Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Debate.
Very in summary:
Prey
consists of bringing the
#metoo
ethic
to the denunciation against the dark areas of Islamic culture that its author has undertaken as a survivor of oppression in Sudan.
"Part of current feminism is inhibited when the aggressor has brown skin," says the activist in her new essay.
A relentless spy
Owen Matthews. Review.
The fidelity of today's public to twentieth-century spy stories, whether in the form of a novel or a non-fiction book, is curious.
In
A Relentless Spy
, the protagonist is Richard Sorge, the charming German with a dissolute life who allowed the Soviet Union to win World War II ... but was purged by Stalin's paranoia.
Agent Sonya
Ben Macintyre. Review.
Another Soviet spy story.
This time, one of the incentives is the signature: Ben Macintyre, author of the biography of Kim Philby and the unforgettable
Spy and Traitor
, has had the talent to use the anecdote of espionage as a way to explain the 20th century.
In
Agent Sonya,
the protagonist is Ursula Kucynski, the highest-ranking spy of World War II.
The botany of feelings
Ilaria Bernardini. Grijalbo.
The great
Italian
bestseller
of recent years appears to be an entertainment novel aimed at generating good feelings among readers, but it is more complex and more obscure than it seems.
Its protagonists are bourgeois women, educated, liberated but also fragile in a world of orphans and fears.
The evanescent half
Brit Bennett.GETTY
Brit Bennett. Random House Literature.
The setting is a lost town in Louisiana in which a community of descendants of slaves is about to complete an absurd task: stop being black.
Two
dissident
women
from that system set in motion the plot of a novel that serves to narrate the history of African Americans and their tragic destiny from another perspective.
The scars of independence
Holger Hoock. Wake up Ferro.
Lynching mobs, manipulative propaganda, racist violence ... Holger Hoock, rewrites the war of the 13 colonies against the British Empire as a ruthless time that is the cultural root of the instability of US democracy and that leads to the taking of the Capitol of the past Kings Day.
Independence
Javier Cercas. Tusquets.
Independencia is
not only about the
process
.
Or yes it does, but indirectly.
Melchor Marín, the heroic mosso who starred in
Terra Alta
, now appears entangled in a blackmail case against a mayor of Barcelona who is not Ada Colau or, if she is, is hiding.
Along the way, the springs of power in Catalonia are portrayed.
Amazement and disenchantment
Jorge Bustos.JOSÉ AYMÁ
Jorge Bustos. Libos from the Asteroid.
Any travel book hides an inner journey.
In the case of
Asombro y disenchantment
, the two routes that Bustos narrates (one through the towns that Don Quixote traveled; the other through France), accompany the author in the discovery of antidogmatism, Cervantes irony and French literature, from Bazac to Montaigne.
Fairground fat
Esther García Llovet. Anagram.
Esther García Llovet's novels seem like something modern, but, in reality, they refer to the absurd humor of the other 27, to the crazy situations of Ramón and company.
Its incentives: sad comedians, rogues from another era, Chinese who have money for punishment and an ugly and tender Madrid that is already a cult scene.
The song of Achilles
Madeline Miller. DNA.
The genre of Greek myth applied to contemporary codes never ends.
Miller, the author of the successful
Circe
, takes the beautiful and pluperfect Achilles and turns him into an adventure partner (and a little love) of the clumsy Patroclus, so that together they are a bit Quixote and Sancho.
Berlanga
Miguel Ángel Villena. Tusquets.
The great biography of the centenary of Luis García can be summarized in a simple thesis: underneath the sense of humor, the humor of
Plácido
or
The National Shotgun
and the joyful erotomania of La Sonrisa Vertical, there was hidden a very deep sadness and character depressing and touching.
My UFO from Perestroika
Daniel Utrilla. KO books.
On September 27, 1989, in the middle of the dismantling of the USSR, an alien ship landed in Russia ... or so the official Tass agency assured.
Daniel Utrilla uses that crazy anecdote to narrate a dramatic and at the same time hilarious moment in the history of Europe.
The country of the others
Leila Slimani, SERGIO G. VALERO
Leila Slimani. Cabaret Voltaire.
The author of
Sweet Song
, one of the best Goncourt awards of the last decade, changes her focus a bit: from Arab immigration in France to the Moroccan middle class that fought for the independence of their country in the 1950s.
His mission, obviously, ended in utopia and his story, in disenchantment.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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