A literary tour of 15 cities in Spain. There are cities that have been marked by literature. Writers have thrust their quills into their streets and their inhabitants to decipher the pulsating entrails of those cities.
Several Spanish cities would be impossible to understand without some of those books. We have included in this list those recent novels that explore the in-between spaces of cities and their social realities. We have left behind the classic (even the masterpieces) such as Pérez Galdós’ novels about Madrid or Morse’s Catalan books, to focus instead in the way these cities have been featured in fiction during the last few years.
A good many books about Madrid could have made the list, but we chose Cómo dejar de escribir (How to Stop Writing), by Esther García Llovet, that describes a more contemporary Madrid, a Madrid beset by financial crisis, ambition, desire, and frustration. Barcelona has not been the same after Francisco Casavella’s El día del Watusi (The Day of the Watusi), a portrait of the city during the transition to democracy after Franco –and everything that came after. Javier Cercas tried to get close and personal with the heroin-scourged Girona of the 80s with Las leyes de la frontera (The Laws of the Frontier). A city, yes, but also a history of the life in contemporary Spain.
From the Basque Country we picked Años lentos (Slow Years), by Fernando Aramburu, that immerses itself in San Sebastián and the most recent history of Euskadi. The same thing happens with the Bilbao of Sé que mi padre decía (I Know My Father Used to Say), by Willy Uribe.
The most recent Gijón is reflected in Pablo Rivero’s Érase una vez el fin (Once Upon a Time, There Was the End), while Jesús Ruiz Mantilla recreates twentieth-century Santander in Ahogada en llamas (She Drowned in Flame).
