Delta
One Year on the Ebro Delta
Published on 25. December 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
352 pages
978-1-63206-403-5 (ISBN)
Description
A year spent at the precipice of severe climate change in oceanfront Spain.
The Last House Before the Sea is the magnificent result of a year lived on the island of Buda, contemplating the passing of the seasons, the marshes, the seabirds, and a relentless horizon. In its pages, Gabi Martinez stitches scenes of the natural world alongside the day-to-day lives of this unique island's residents, many of whom have called it home for generations. But something disrupts the slow rhythms of eel fishing, rice farming, and the Ebro River's flow to the coast. Something is shifting.
As climate change tilts the scales of a fragile coexistence, and rising sea levels threaten to swallow their homes, the island's locals must reconcile their past and future-both beholden to a region that grows more endangered with each passing day.
The Last House Before the Sea is the magnificent result of a year lived on the island of Buda, contemplating the passing of the seasons, the marshes, the seabirds, and a relentless horizon. In its pages, Gabi Martinez stitches scenes of the natural world alongside the day-to-day lives of this unique island's residents, many of whom have called it home for generations. But something disrupts the slow rhythms of eel fishing, rice farming, and the Ebro River's flow to the coast. Something is shifting.
As climate change tilts the scales of a fragile coexistence, and rising sea levels threaten to swallow their homes, the island's locals must reconcile their past and future-both beholden to a region that grows more endangered with each passing day.
Reviews / Votes
"Each industry, interest, and individual that Martinez encounters is presented with tender respect, quiet amusement, and a deep appreciation for natural wonder, the cycles of history, and the human predicament of those who know and love the delta best. . . . The mission of preservation is, like the land itself, murky and muddied, a product of progress and growth both triumphant and misguided; urgency swells and subsides like waters amid daily livelihoods. Martinez's account, in content, structure, and style, mirrors this nuance and complexity, resisting myopic quick fixes and even easy catastrophizing. A steady, tempering, enigmatic chronicle of a polarizing, and ultimately personal, ending."- Kirkus Reviews"The Last House Before the Sea is a revelation . . . a prophetic meditation on the aching precarity of our impossibly beautiful world. Martinez transforms the island of Buda into a microcosm of our world and our future if we do not find in ourselves the love to act. A profound book by one of our finest writers."
- Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This is How You Lose Her
"Deltas are conversations between forces so much larger than the self: between land and sea, between saltwater and fresh, and, in today's climate changed world, between the past and the future. Gabi Martinez pays watchful attention to all who occupy one such landscape in northeastern Spain, asking how do we hold on to what has defined us even as it disappears beneath our very feet? The result is a thoughtful mix of elegy, prayer, and poetry, and in this day and age, we need all three."
- Elizabeth Rush, author of The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World
"Gabi Martinez has invented a new literary genre: one that speaks of nature from within."
- Kirmen Uribe, author of Bilbao-New York-Bilbao
"From the Nile to the Ganges to the Mississippi, deltas not only form a vertebral column throughout human history, but are also essential sources of biodiversity in the planet's balance. The Last House Before the Sea addresses this fascinating and often overlooked topic with exceptional originality, certain of the urgency of its testimony. Like Claudio Magris with the Danube, Gabi Martinez offers his life experience, erudition, and sensitivity on a journey to the heart of the Iberian Mediterranean, which unveils before our eyes the overwhelming evidence of the climate crisis as a collapse of the natural spaces that sustain life on Earth."
- Michel Nieva, author of Dengue Boy
"A book to reconnect with nature, with naturalist literature, with the vibrant story of a present that yearns for a different, better future. Time passes, the year 2023 slips away, but another will come. In [The Last House Before the Sea], however, as if it were an ecological thriller, time is the killer, and everything points to it getting away with murder."
- Gines J. Vera, La Gonzo Magazine
"Gabi Martinez has written his best nonfiction work to date, no doubt about it, but it's as action-packed as a novel. Monologues and voices as vivid as those in theater, and all the beauty of lyric poetry that moves anyone who delves into the pages of his book."
- Chus Garcia, Revista Mercurio
"A monumental book, outstanding, unusual, magnetic, rich, thoughtful, intense and fascinating."
- Jordi Cervera, Diari de Tarragona
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 208 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 33 mm
Weight
476 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-63206-403-5 (9781632064035)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Gabi Martinez is the author of eleven fiction and non-fiction books. He is well-known for his outstanding travel writing and literary journalism, and his novels have been selected as books of the year by Spanish literary magazine Que Leer. Martinez was included in Palgrave/Macmillan's list of the top five writers of Spanish Vanguardism in the last 20 years.
Ezra E. Fitz has translated over twenty books, including narrative nonfiction by Grammy winning musician Juanes and Emmy winning journalist Jorge Ramos, as well as literary fiction by Alberto Fuguet and Eloy Urroz. His translation of Forgiveness by Chiquis Rivera became an instant New York Times bestseller. Fitz served as an instructor with the University of Illinois' Program in Applied Translation, delivered lectures at Iowa, NYU, Tufts, and Vanderbilt among other institutions, and provided all translation services to Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman: Drug Baron, a joint scripted TV miniseries for Netflix/Univision Story House. He has been awarded grants from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA), he was a 2010 Resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow with the Kenyon Review Literary Translation Workshop. He lives with his wife and two children in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
Ezra E. Fitz has translated over twenty books, including narrative nonfiction by Grammy winning musician Juanes and Emmy winning journalist Jorge Ramos, as well as literary fiction by Alberto Fuguet and Eloy Urroz. His translation of Forgiveness by Chiquis Rivera became an instant New York Times bestseller. Fitz served as an instructor with the University of Illinois' Program in Applied Translation, delivered lectures at Iowa, NYU, Tufts, and Vanderbilt among other institutions, and provided all translation services to Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman: Drug Baron, a joint scripted TV miniseries for Netflix/Univision Story House. He has been awarded grants from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA), he was a 2010 Resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow with the Kenyon Review Literary Translation Workshop. He lives with his wife and two children in Spring Hill, Tennessee.