The Wonders
Published on 3. March 2022
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-1-78227-658-6 (ISBN)
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
The Wonders is a poet's novel, delicate but strong, impressing its images firmly on the imagination -- Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Booker Prize Full of brilliant moments of illumination... The effect of [the book's] fragmentation is to make of these individual women's lives a collective picture of working-class Spanish womanhood. With light touches Medel conveys gradual but tremendous change... it has a boldly ingenious structure and flashes of beauty * The Guardian * A vivid and painfully intimate account of two easily overlooked lives. Medel paints a gray world of drudgery and solitude, yet she also makes room for her characters to grow into their power as women, a power they discover does not in fact lie in money * New York Times * 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 A beautifully written novel that examines the lives of three generations of working-class women living precariously in Madrid * Stylist * Medel vividly evokes working-class city life as a monotonous merry-go-round of metro stations and dead-end jobs... each vignette is compelling and well observed * Times Literary Supplement * The diminution of choices which poverty forces on people is superbly well explored in The Wonders by Elena Medel, translated by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead * The Irish Times * An ambitious and enlightening book from an acclaimed Spanish poet -- Sarah Gilmartin * The Irish Times * Arresting characterizations and vivid prose fuel Medel's searing look at the impact gender, class, and financial hardships have on working-class Spanish women's lives as the country is buffeted by wider cultural shifts. It adds up to a powerful story * Publishers Weekly * Medel's debut novel examines the lives of three generations of women in Madrid with an unsparing eye * Kirkus Reviews, starred review * At just over 200 pages, The Wonders is a novel that doesn't waste a single word, instead basking in all the linguistic pleasures of great poetry * Sunday Business Post * 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' 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 * Spanish poet Medel's remarkable English-language debut moves from Francoist Spain into the present day, tracing a family's fractured ties over three generations... Arresting characterizations and vivid prose fuel Medel's searing look at the impact gender, class, and financial hardships have on working-class Spanish women's lives as the country is buffeted by wider cultural shifts. It adds up to a powerful story * Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) * Reminiscent of Annie Ernaux, Elena Ferrante, and Deborah Levy... A thing of beauty... [an] extraordinary composition * Irish Examiner * This slim novel, by one of Spain's foremost contemporary poets, covers a vast amount of ground * Meath Chronicle * A skillful, shattering first novel of great finesse, rare intelligence and profound maturity * Le Monde * In the wake of Annie Ernaux and Virginia Woolf, Elena Medel weaves together the intimate and the political from a rarely read point of view. A powerful new feminist voice * L'Humanite * Medel's sensitive debut, charged with feminist insights but never losing sight of the particularities of its characters, astutely examines the forces-political, economic, familial, and personal-that have shaped the two women's richly detailed lives. * Booklist, starred review * Throughout this captivating novel, Medel's poetic voice shines * Ms Magazine * An unflinching story about class, sex, family, and working women everywhere, this book achieves a rare combination of novelistic plotting and virtuosic interiority that left me rooting for Maria and Alicia as if I'd known them all my life -- Anna Solomon, author of The Book of V Dreamlike yet precise, internal yet expansive, The Wonders moves between generations of women with a clear-eyed empathy for their struggles to be free. Medel's characters are hungry, angry, imperfect, and completely alive -- Adrienne Celt, author of Invitation to a Bonfire and End of the World House Elena Medel is one of my favorite writers in all of Spain. Brave and tender, extremely intelligent and surprising, her writing is pure poetic lucidity -- Valter Hugo Mae The Wonders is a novel that looks at people and history with overwhelming clarity. Among the best in contemporary literature -- Jose Luis Peixoto At its core, The Wonders is a novel about family and memory. Elena Medel displays a fundamental understanding of people that makes it easy to care deeply about these characters and their stories. This is not a book anyone should miss * Litro * Vividly brings to life the stories of two working women... with this audacious and expansive novel, [Medel has] declared herself a writer to watch * Book Riot *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-78227-658-6 (9781782276586)
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
Other editions
New editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2022
Pushkin Press
€9.59
Available for download
Persons
Elena Medel was born in Cordoba in 1985 and lives in Madrid. She is the author of three poetry collections and two works of non-fiction. At 19 she founded the poetry publishing house La Bella Varsovia, one of the most prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world. She is the recipient of the XXVI Loewe Prize for Young Poets, the Princess of Girona Foundation Arts and Literature Award 2016 for the whole of her work and the Francisco Umbral Prize for the Best Book Of The Year 2020. The Wonders is her first novel.