The critics of 'Babelia’ review the new works by Lola Shoneyin, Carmen Martín Gaite, Sergio Loo, José Antonio Abella, Federico Jiménez Losantos and Jane Birkin.

“Las vidas secretas de las esposas de Baba Segi,” a 2010 novel brought to Spain by Libros del Baobab, has won several awards and has been translated into several languages. And it is undoubtedly one of those jewels that, unfairly, the mental distance that we maintain with African history and culture places it too far from our environment, our shelves, our bedside table. In it, the Nigerian Lola Shoneyin describes with humor and irony the unique family that Baba Segi has formed to his measure, a simpleton merchant who accumulates women within the polygamous tradition of his culture.

Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000) loved to talk, speak out loud. Along with her poems, the lectures and speeches she gave, have just been published, providing an essential complement to her narrative and essay work. Sergio Loo, a Mexican writer who died at the age of 32, left in his posthumous work, “Operación al cuerpo enfermo,” a multifaceted book in which he narrates his disease: a sarcoma in the femur of his left leg. In it, illness is presented with a richer literary ability: contorting the world and freeing it from the sadness of reality or from a moralistic attachment to facts.

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