Description

‘A poet’s novel, delicate but strong’ Hilary Mantel

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 her 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.

Publisher Review

'A mesmerizing read. Medel's prose is hypnotic, it's hard to believe this is her first novel. I was completely engrossed in this story, in the shadow each generation casts on the one that comes after it, in the tension between caring for oneself and caring for others' - Avni Doshi, author of the 2020 Booker Prize-Shortlisted Burnt Sugar 'Completely unsentimental and with a harshness that hides the most radiant and painful of scars, Elena Medel's The Wonders brings to life several generations of working women: it's a serene and impious novel that puts class, feminism, and the eternal complexity of family ties at the fore' - Mariana Enriquez, author of the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed 'Narration and style go hand in hand in a literary wonder that is absolutely personal yet reminds you of the audacity of Virginia Woolf... one of Spain's best poets has become one of its most important novelists' - El Pais 'Without falling into cliches, with a style that exudes lyricism, Medel narrates what recent Spanish history has meant for women... a narrative wonder' - ABC Cultural 'Very rarely do natural talents, linguistic discipline, and emotional rawness coincide. That is the case of Elena Medel, one of the great young poets of our language, whose first novel unfolds a history of crude intimacies, subtle roughness and luminous sadness, who works from class conscience with moral force, stylistic precision and narrative honesty' - Andres Neuman, author of 'Traveller of the Century'