The Wonders

'Mesmerising. Medel's prose is hypnotic – it's hard to believe this is her first novel.' Avni Doshi, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted Burnt Sugar

'A serene and impious novel that puts class, feminism and the eternal complexity of family ties at the fore' Mariana Enríquez, author of the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

AN AUDACIOUS, HEARTBREAKING DEBUT ABOUT WORKING-CLASS WOMEN'S LIVES ACROSS TWO GENERATIONS, HERALDING A NEW EUROPEAN LITERARY STAR

María and her granddaughter Alicia have never met. Decades apart, both make the same journey to Madrid in search of work and independence. María, 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 was brought low by 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.

WINNER OF THE FRANCISCO UMBRAL PRIZE

'Very rarely do natural talent, linguistic discipline, and emotional rawness coincide… unfolds a history of crude intimacies, subtle roughness and luminous sadness' Andrés Neuman, author of Traveller of the Century