The Wonders

Resumen del libro

Maria and her granddaughter Alicia have never met. Decades apart, both make the same journey 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 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.

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.