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. Elena Medel nació en 1985 en Córdoba, aunque reside en Madrid. Ha publicado los libros de poesía x{0026}lt;i Mi primer bikinix{0026}lt;/i (DVD, 2002; traducido al inglés y al sueco), x{0026}lt;i Tarax{0026}lt;/i (DVD, 2006) y x{0026}lt;i Chattertonx{0026}lt;/i (Visor, 2014), reunidos en x{0026}lt;i Un día negro en una casa de mentirax{0026}lt;/i (Visor, 2015); los ensayos x{0026}lt;i El mundo magox{0026}lt;/i (Ariel, 2015) y x{0026}lt;i Todo lo que hay que saber sobre poesíax{0026}lt;/i (Ariel, 2018); y la novela x{0026}lt;i Las maravillasx{0026}lt;/i (Anagrama, 2020), traducida a quince idiomas, ganadora del Premio Francisco Umbral al Libro del Año 2020 e incluida en la x{0026}lt;i longlistx{0026}lt;/i del Dublin Literary Award 2023. Entre otros galardones, ha obtenido el XXVI Premio Loewe a la Creación Joven, el Premio Fundación Princesa de Girona 2016 en la categoría de Artes y Letras y la beca Leonardo para Investigadores y Creadores Culturales 2021 de la Fundación BBVA. Ha sido escritora residente del Alan Cheuse International Writers Center de la Universidad George Mason (Virginia). Dirige el sello de poesía La Bella Varsovia.