BookTalk
Book Talk with Smiffs book & card store , Nerja
María Dueñas is the author of the international bestselling novel The Seamstress , which together with her novella The Heart Has Its Reasons has sold more than six million copies worldwide .
A Vineyard In Andalusia ( p ), the Murcia-based author ’ s latest work , leads off the latest Soltalk Hotlist of titles , some entirely new , others moving into small paperback format for the first time or being reissued , sometimes after a long time out of print . All are due for publication on various dates this month and in early December . The Soltalk Hotlist helps readers to plan and budget for book ordering , particularly with the gift-giving season ahead .
A Vineyard In Andalusia is a historical epic featuring a ruined merchant who sets sail to seek his fortune in the 19th century Spanish Empire . Haunted by his lost wealth , he gambles the last of his money on what will become the greatest adventure of his life . When Mauro Larrea meets Soledad Montalvo , wife to a London wine merchant , she drags him into a most unexpected future , from the new Mexican republic to magnificent colonial Havana ; and from the West Indies to the Andalusia of the 1860s , when the wine trade with United Kingdom made the small city of Jerez de la Frontera legendary .
Like A Fading Shadow ( l ) is a new novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina , one of Spain ’ s most important contemporary authors . It explores borders between the imagined , the reported , and the experienced past in the construction of identity . On April 4 , 1968 , Martin Luther King was murdered in the US by James Earl Ray . Before Ray ’ s capture and sentencing to 99 years ’ imprisonment , he evaded the US Federal Bureau of Investigation for two months as he crossed the globe under various aliases . At the heart of his story is Lisbon , where he spent 10 days trying to acquire an Angolan visa . Like A Fading Shadow traces three journeys to the city .
In The Impostor ( l ), Barcelona-based Javier Cercas presents a true story packed with fiction and created by the main character , Enric Marco . Who is this old man from Barcelona who claims to be a Nazi concentration camp survivor and rises to be president of Spain ’ s leading Holocaust movement . By the time he is unmasked in Austria in 2005 on the eve
of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp , he has become a civic hero . His case shocked the world , and Marco was labelled a great imposter , to which he responded : “ I am an impostor , but not a fraud .” A decade later , Cercas addresses the enigma of the man , his truths and lies , and delves with passion and honesty into humankind ’ s infinite capacity for selfdeception . Are we not all , asks Cercas , the novelists of our own lives ?
Among the new thriller titles , The Midnight Line ( l ), by Lee Child , stands out for consideration as a gift . As the hero Jack Reacher takes an aimless stroll past a pawn shop in a small US Midwest town , he sees in the window a West Point military academy class ring from 2005 . It is tiny : a woman cadet ’ s graduation present to herself . Why would she give it up ? Reacher ’ s a West Pointer too , and he knows what she went through to get it . He tracks the ring back to its owner , step by step , down a criminal trail leading west to the deserted wilds of Wyoming . All he wants is to find the woman . If she is OK , he will walk away . If she is not alright , he will stop at nothing .
The Secret of Vesalius ( l ), a first novel by Valencia-based Jordi Llobregat , is a kind of Frankenstein-meets-The Shadow Of The Wind affair . This Gothic thriller casts 19th century Barcelona as a diabolical ‘ character ’ emerging from the dark into a new electrical age , aflame with spirit , superstition and science . Daniel Amat has left behind Spain and all that happened there . Having just achieved brilliance in ancient languages at Oxford University and an even more advantageous engagement , the arrival of a letter - a demand stamped ‘ Barcelona ’ – ֪comes like a cold slap on the neck .
For the first time in a quarter century , a major new volume of translations of the beloved poetry of Spain ’ s Federico García Lorca is published . Poet In Spain ( l ) is a beautiful bilingual edition already lauded for bringing readers in English closer than ever to the ‘ wild , innate , local surrealism ’ of Lorca ’ s Spanish voice in moonlit poems of love and death set among poplars , rivers , low hills , and high sierras .
Translator Sarah Arvio has included , among other essential works , the folkloric yet modernist Gypsy Ballads , the plaintive
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