The Wonders

Resumen del libro

This is a story about money, about how the money that a woman does not have will shape her life. Maria and Alicia are a grandmother and granddaughter who have never met. Decades apart, both are drawn to Madrid in search of work and independence.

Maria, scraping together a living as a cleaner and carer, sending money back home for the daughter she hardly knows; Alicia, raised in prosperity until her family was brought low by tragedy, now trapped in a low-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 the 2018 Spanish Women's Strike.

Audacious, intimate and shot through with sharp-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.

Biografía del autor

Elena Medel es poeta y ensayista. Directora de la editorial La Bella Varsovia y coordinadora del proyecto Cien de Cien, es autora del poemario Un día negro en una casa de mentira y de los ensayos El mundo mago: cómo vivir con Antonio Machado y Todo lo que hay que saber sobre poesía, ambos publicados por Ariel. Ha sido merecedora del XXVI Premio Loewe a la Creación Joven, el Premio Fundación Princesa de Girona 2016 en la categoría de Artes y Letras, y el Premio Francisco Umbral al mejor libro de 2020 por Las maravillas. Su obra está traducida a multitud de idiomas.