Bøger udgivet af Small Stations Press

This volume contains four of the best short stories by Spanish National Book Award winner Paco Martín. In "The New Fire", a commune has been set up in an abandoned village. One of the residents, Mr Mirión, has a kind of totem pole in his yard, which the narrator and his friend would like to use for the St John's bonfire, but they're afraid to approach him. In "Fina", a local doctor writes a letter to his ex-wife and a group of friends to explain the case of a young patient called Fina, who later became a very beautiful woman, and how desperate she was to have a child. In "Pitchfork", a name used in Galician to refer to the common earwig, Rita is having an affair with a married composer, Silvio Moreiras, who introduces her by a different name wherever they go. Silvio arranges to take her to a friend's villa with a view to having a good time and then calling off their relationship. In "Motorway", Milucho is an unofficial guide who accompanies tour groups to various destinations. On the way from Galicia to Madrid, the brand-new bus they are on breaks down, and Milucho is left to appease the travellers in searing heat, without being able to pinpoint on the map exactly where they are. A rich and varied story collection with elements of the supernatural. Paco Martín is well known for his stories and children's literature. In 1986, he was one of only two Galician writers to win the Spanish National Book Award for his novel The Things of Ramón Lamote, illustrated by Xoán Balboa and also available in English from Small Stations Press.

In this collection, Fina Casalderrey regales us with five stories written in the starry firmament of night. In the title story, a woman moves with her husband to a house in the village, where she plans to give birth, and is approached by a gardener who offers to tend the garden at night. In "Appointment in the Gardens of the South", a descendant of Galician emigrants to Argentina is drawn to a bronze statue whose face he cannot make out, which leads him to dig into his memory. In "Gusts of Mist", a woman walks the Northern Way to Santiago de Compostela in pursuit of happiness. In "Residence Zero", an artist moves to a new housing development in search of space, but finds it unsettling. In "An Ice Cream for Life", a man is shocked to discover that he has no heart. This book is reminiscent of another classic of Galician literature, When There's a Knock on the Door at Night, also available from Small Stations Press. Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's best-known writers of young people's literature. She is a winner of the Spanish National Book Award and Spain's candidate for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (the "Nobel Prize" for children's literature). Two of her novels have already appeared in English: Dove and Cut Throat and Just Imagine, Merche!

Captain Lourenço d'Ourantes lives in the cold, northern wood of Luiçiana. His soldiering days are over. He has taken refuge among a people who rid themselves of their overlord and the servants of the Church in order to be free of their control. One day, a messenger arrives from the county of Constança Valley in the south. D'Ourantes' first impulse is to send him away, he has no interest in revisiting his fighting days. But then the messenger explains that he is wanted by the Count not as a soldier, but as a wolf hunter. The same wolf that escaped his clutches in White Cliffs has returned to torment the people of Constança Valley and has killed the Count's son. D'Ourantes will embark on a journey of redemption, dodging the traps set by bandits, robbers, and rapists, coming across boatmen, blind seers, Robin Hood figures. Night of the Wolf introduces us to a land of legends that exists only in the author's imagination - the same feat he achieved with his previous novel, Night of the Crow - so convincingly that we feel the cold in our bones, the swaying of the boat, the coarseness of the rope around our wrists, the slicing of teeth. Perhaps we know more about the wolf than we think. Abel Tomé won the prestigious Illa Nova Award for Fiction for Night of the Wolf. His previous novel, Night of the Crow, is also published by Small Stations Press.

Miranda's parents, Asterius and Melina, run a tavern in Syracuse, a historic city on the Italian island of Sicily. They are immigrants from Crete, which they had to leave in a hurry, never to return. One of their customers is a blind man called Polyeuphemius, who is almost a member of the family, but they are wary of another customer, Olysseus, who traffics in ancient artefacts and will stop at nothing to get what he wants. One day, Miranda bumps into Antelmo, a schoolmate who is now a fisherman and has grown into a bit of a hunk. Antelmo invites her to join the League of Gorgons, an organization that endeavours to prevent Sicily's cultural heritage from being pillaged. This will lead her to cross the island with a mathematical treatise by Archimedes, dodging craters left behind by the combatants of the Second World War, to learn about her family's past, and to meet a great inventor who specializes in aircraft, Dae Dalus. The text is interspersed with stories that reintroduce the reader to Greek myths, and with characters, some of whom are not what they seem... Marilar Aleixandre was awarded the Spanish National Book Award for Fiction in 2022. She lectures in Environmental and Science Education at Santiago de Compostela University. Her works have received important literary prizes and featured in the White Ravens catalogue. She is also an accomplished translator. Her reinterpretation of the Medusa myth, Head of Medusa, is also available in English from Small Stations Press.

In Night of the Caiman, a writer, Ricardo Barros, seeks to complete his magnum opus and in the process to recreate something of the life of David Goodis. He will even move to Goodis' native Philadelphia to follow in his footsteps and discover something of the darker corners that this city contains. His teacher in the art of writing is Vicente Mallón, pseudonym Vincent Malone, whose secretary, Selma, the daughter of a local policeman, will also end up in Philly, seeking the lost treasure that she lovingly handed over to a man who was not deserving of her trust. Each paragraph in this narrative has been painstakingly constructed. The book in its entirety serves as a tribute to all the authors and filmmakers - from David Goodis to Dashiell Hammett and Patricia Highsmith, François Truffaut and Paul Wendkos - who with their work and devotion to their craft have gifted us hours of entertainment. Diego Ameixeiras was born in Lausanne, but grew up in Ourense (the Oregon of his books). He is the best-known writer of noir fiction in Galicia. Prizes he has won include the Xerais for Three Seconds of Memory and the Spanish Critics' Award for The Deer and the Shadow. Tell Me Something Dirty and Drive Quickly received special mentions at Black Week, a week in Gijón devoted to crime writing. He has also been recognized for his work as a scriptwriter for theatre and film, and has translated works by Chandler and Hammett into Galician for the publishing house Hugo e Munin.

Language is encoded. The words we use every day can tell us something about the meaning of human life, our purpose in this world, the divine being known as God, the creation of the world, the Fall, the economy, the environment... Once our eyes are opened at birth or soon after, we think that we see, but we do not realize that there is another level to reality, a spiritual dimension, for which we need our spiritual eyes to be opened. When this happens, when we believe in God and participate in the sacraments of the Church, we begin to perceive God all around us, in everyday objects such as trees, rocks, nature. These other realities, hitherto unseen, are called "logoi" in Greek-fragments of the Word. They are also present in language. Apart from the meaning we give them, words contain their own meaning. They can be read in reverse, the letters can be rearranged or changed according to the rules of phonetics, their order in the alphabet, their appearance. The rules that must be followed to find connections between words and uncover their deeper meaning are always the same. Seven Brief Lessons on Language aims to give the reader a simple, but in-depth view of the spiritual side to language. Its title and format are adapted from Carlo Rovelli's book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, but the content is entirely different. Each chapter can be read in a single sitting. Put together, these seven lessons (and a short postscript) will open the reader's eyes to a reality they never knew existed.

Vicente was raised in a Galician community in Northwest London, but prefers to establish his own identity further south, in Stockwell, where he lives in a squat with Andy, Patrick and the Lizard. They are professional jugglers and eke out a living putting on performances of Harlequin and Pierrot. When not performing, they play poker using potato chips. Vicente also does odd jobs for an Irishman called Reddy. He takes Jane, a woman he has just met, on a date to his favourite Portuguese café, where they serve galão coffee and custard tarts, but the date doesn't go to plan, Vicente is somehow distracted. That is until, on his way to the local takeaway to stock up on potato chips, he comes across a pistol that has been discarded in a rubbish bin and decides to take it home. The band of jugglers use this pistol to carry out a hold-up at a nearby off-licence, which goes disastrously wrong. Three of the friends have little choice but to seek refuge from the police in Galicia, where Vicente has some land he inherited from his parents, but will he be able to adapt to life in his homeland? And what will happen if he returns to England only to find his place has been taken by another, his role on stage has been usurped? The Clowns from Paradise is a rich, multi-layered narrative that forces the reader to re-evaluate the characters and props we take for granted.

Wolfram (or tungsten), because of its hardness and high density, was an important raw material for the arms industry during the Second World War. The main European source of this element was Portugal, which was therefore put under pressure by both the Allies and the Nazis, but Galicia in north-west Spain, sitting on top of Portugal, was also an important source. Hence the 'fever' referred to in the title of this book. Not only did the Germans set up official mines in Galicia to extract wolfram, but there were lots of unofficial miners hoping to make a quick buck. Carmucha's father, Matías, had been roped into becoming the president of the Casino Club in Noia, a small coastal town twenty miles west of Santiago de Compostela, making him part of the establishment, but Carmucha is her own woman and she prefers to sell to the English. This will bring her into conflict with Yellow, a civil guard with his finger on the pulse of the illegal trade in wolfram, who doesn't like his interests being interfered with. It will also bring her into contact with an English agent, Colin, who offers her a much higher price than that being paid on the market. Against a backdrop of Allied-Axis conflict, in a Spain under Franco's dictatorship, Carmucha will need to walk a very fine line between opposing interests if she doesn't want to end up dead in a ditch. She will need to do this with or without the support of her father, with whom she has a difficult relationship and who always seems to want to rein her in. Héctor Carré is a Galician film director and writer who has worked on international films such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. His first full-length movie, Burn Me, was nominated for a Goya award. His novel Fever won the prestigious Caixa Galicia Foundation Prize for Young People's Literature in 2011.

Estevo is a young man for whom things are not going too badly. In his university entrance exam, he got an average of over 10 (however that may be possible), which means he should be able to enrol for the course of his choice, Science of Culture. He lives with his parents in a desirable housing development called 'Weeping Willow' on the outskirts of the coastal town of Valdomar. His father is an eye doctor at the local hospital, 'Our Lady of the Forsaken', his mother is a teacher, and he has a girlfriend called Paula. Everything seems to be going swimmingly, and yet a few months earlier, in March, while driving his moped, he knocked over an old lady by the name of Mercedes Alemparte - Chiruca to her friends - on a clearly marked zebra crossing in the centre of town, as a result of which the lady broke her hip. The judge, a progressive judge who likes to give exemplary sentences, decides he will have to visit Chiruca two times a week during the month of July to keep her company and to help with any housework. She hopes this will have a positive impact on Estevo and enable him to reflect on his actions. Out of these meetings, a strong friendship will blossom - a friendship that bridges generations and leads to Estevo and Paula getting involved in a family history they knew nothing about. Estevo and Paula will embark on a wild-goose chase that will take them to the local cemetery, the undertaker's, an old people's home near Coruña, and mean, just as the judge intended, that Estevo's last summer as a free agent before the rigours of adulthood set in isn't idly frittered away. Héctor Cajaraville is a writer, journalist and secondary-school teacher whose work has obtained important literary prizes in Galicia, including the Merlin for children's literature and the Xerais for novels. The Box of Resentments was awarded the Queen Lupa Prize for Young People's Literature in 2015.

Auria is almost fifteen. In the summer of 1991, she bumps into the parish priest, Salvador, on a street of her home town. During the month of August, he is organizing a pilgrimage lasting twenty-two days to Częstochowa, a city in Poland, to celebrate World Youth Day. Auria is taken aback when he invites her to join the pilgrimage, but when her mother supports the idea, she decides to take a risk. Her mother, Luísa, works as a seamstress and is always telling Auria not to make the same mistakes she did, getting pregnant when she was only eighteen and having to raise a child on her own. There's no danger of that, thinks Auria. She has no interest whatsoever in men. But this new trip - which will take in such places as Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Venice - will bring her into close contact with Paio, Salvador's cousin once removed, and what was previously unthinkable may actually happen, she may actually experience all the intensity of first love. Auria shares all the events of that fateful summer with her diary, her new best friend, a diary she decides to call Merche. Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's best-known writers of young adult fiction and is the recipient of the Spanish National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Her novel Dove and Cut Throat, a charming story about a boy who gets bullied at school and who is torn between the two girls in his life - a classmate, Halima, and a girl he has met on the Internet, Dove - is also published in English by Small Stations Press.

Nobody by contemporary Galician writer Fran Alonso is a book of ten short stories about noise (and silence), the disjunction in our lives between what we really feel and our public persona. In these stories, a man is bombarded by the noise from his neighbours and goes upstairs to have it out with the woman who is always shouting at her children, with unforeseen consequences. An Old Man lives in a semi-deserted city; his only way to mark the passing of time is to make a cut in his hand every day - that is, until he spots an Old Woman on the balcony opposite who is constantly knitting. Sick and tired of noise in the city, a woman endeavours to change her lifestyle by moving to a house on a cliff. Writer finishes a novel and leaves it on a lectern in the lobby for his neighbours to read. S. Lonely, who relies heavily on technological gadgets to keep himself entertained and prefers not to go outside, is so bored during the holidays that he decides to go on a trip... Every story in this book analyzes the relationship between the individual and society, the individualism of urban living versus the community obligations of the village, forcing the reader to reconsider the kind of world they live in and the sincerity of their relationships. This is a book for our times that draws on the powerful story-telling tradition of Galician literature. Fran Alonso is a writer of Galician fiction and poetry. Nobody is his latest work of adult fiction. He regularly takes part in anthologies and collective/online projects. He has overseen fiction and poetry collections for the Galician publishing house Edicións Xerais de Galicia, of which he is now director.

and they say is a dazzling piece of writing by contemporary galician writer susana sanches arins. suffering is a black stormcloud on a sunny day. the trouble with remembering is it can cause damage. but it can also heal. the translator of this book, the north american professor kathleen march, suggests that and they say (seique in the original galician) is its own genre and what really matters is telling (recovering) the truth. it is a story of betrayal, unspeakable cruelty, and the odd (breathless) act of compassion. it is the recuperation of the collective memory of the spanish civil war (1936-39) and its aftermath, when fugitives were caught and bodies thrown into ditches, when it was dangerous to answer your door at night. it is an essay that records testimonies, acknowledged and anonymous, of some of the dark nights that characterize this period of spanish history. it is poetic (if poetry can be cruel). it is also tragic, down to the repeated appearance of the chorus, which seems to reflect on, to reinforce, the central message: memory can be painful, but it is best acknowledged, so that the mourning can take place and the survivors can move on. this book, expertly collated, is a masterpiece of writing on the spanish civil war, an essential piece in the puzzle of those years. susana sanches arins is a high-school teacher in galicia. she is also a well-known author. the second, revised edition of seique, the one that is reproduced here in english, was awarded the narrative prize at the fifth galician book gala in 2020. kathleen march is professor emerita of the university of maine. she has also translated some of the most respected names in galician literature: rosalía de castro, álvaro cunqueiro, anxo angueira, marica campo and miguel anxo fernández among others.

At the suggestion of a psychiatrist from Vienna called Ingrid, The Operation is recounted from the point of view of five people: Leandro Balseiro, the artist, who fills his mother's house with studies and has an affair with his art teacher, Candela Roma; the artist's mother, Clara Balseiro, who recounts the story of generations of her family, her father's obsession for flowers, and her son's involvement in an environmental protest group; Daniel Sampaio, a concert pianist who lost his memory on being run over by a car in Santiago and who was treated at the hospital by Clara; the psychiatrist herself, Ingrid Meyer; and the art teacher, Candela Roma. The book reads like a Galician version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, except that the family concerned here is not the Buendías, but the Balseiros. It is also a call to environmental activism, to a creative engagement with the world around us and with the language that we use. Teresa Moure's earlier novel, Black Nightshade, winner of the Xerais Prize for Novels, about the relationship between the French philosopher René Descartes, the herbalist Hélène Jans and Queen Christina of Sweden, is also available from Small Stations Press in Philip Krummrich's translation.

There are three bestsellers of Galician literature: The Carpenter's Pencil by Manuel Rivas, a love story set in the Spanish Civil War; Winter Letters by Agustín Fernández Paz, about a man who decides to find out if a haunted house is really haunted (this title is also available from Small Stations Press); and perhaps most famously of all Memoirs of a Village Boy by Xosé Neira Vilas. This book, according to Wikipedia, is the most published work of Galician literature and has sold 700,000 copies in the Galician language. Now this work is being made available in an English translation by John Rutherford, founder of the Centre for Galician Studies at Oxford University and translator of Don Quixote and La Regenta for Penguin Classics. The book is a diary kept by Balbino, a village boy, 'in other words a nobody'. In the first chapter, he describes the village as 'a mixture of mud and smoke, where the dogs howl and the people die "when God sees fit"'. He would like to see the world, to go over seas and lands he doesn't know. He was born and brought up in the village, but now it feels small, cramped, as if he was living in a beehive. Behind the detailed description of village life, there is a fierce indictment of the iniquities of Galicia's feudal system, which is remarkable in a book first published in 1961, at the height of Franco's rule. Memoirs of a Village Boy paints a picture of the hardships and hard-won joys of life in a Galician village in the middle of the twentieth century, a life that was once common, but is now distant from our technology-dominated lives. It is a book to relish as one is transported by the richness of the language to another place and time.

This book sets out, in a bilingual Galician-English edition, to present the work of one of Galicia's best-known contemporary poets, Luz Pozo Garza. The book contains six poems that, according to the translator Adina Ioana Vladu in her introduction, "constitute a small cycle dedicated to the Galician poet, writer, and feminist scholar Carmen Blanco, author of essays and critical editions of Luz Pozo Garza's poetry, and the poet, essayist, and author of short stories Claudio Rodríguez Fer". The writer of the introduction continues, "The choice of this particular set of poems is explained by its special significance within the poet's ample work: it is a hymn to sorority, following the red thread connecting the Chinese twelfth-century poet Li Yian (better known as Li Qingzhao), Rosalía de Castro, Luz Pozo Garza, and Carmen Blanco; an exaltation of the universality of love, as the symbol of the lovers, the 'mythical couple', extends from Dante and Beatrice to Luz Pozo and Eduardo Moreiras to Carmen Blanco and Claudio Rodríguez Fer; and an ode to the poet's homeland and language." It is to be hoped that this anthology will serve as an introduction to one of the most celebrated and mystical voices of contemporary Galician poetry. Also included is the Proust Questionnaire that the poet answered for the cultural magazine Evohé in 2010, translated by Jonathan Dunne.

Xoana is the descendant of hard-working women, starting with Pepa the Mole, her great-great-great-grandmother, who went around with a peddler, Maricallo, who played the violin and sang coplas, romantic songs, at the fairs in Galicia. At one fair, in Monterroso, she was raped under cover of night. Pepa dreamed that in actual fact she had been made love to by Einhard, Charlemagne's page, and in the manner of an oyster she wrapped an affliction with the purest of material until it was transformed into a pearl. Xoana's great-great-grandmother was Rosa, who worked in the Big House as a maid, where she was made pregnant by the lord of the manor, Don Álvaro, and likewise became a single mother. Her great-grandmother was Carolina, happy as a tinkling bell and strong as boxwood. Carolina's husband died while digging a tunnel in Asturias, only two years after they had been married, so she ended up being a single mother as well. Her grandmother was Carme, who attended a convent school in Zaragoza, where there was a strict divide between paying and non-paying pupils. This irked Carme so much she stirred up trouble and got expelled, much to her uncle Xenxo's delight, who hadn't wanted her to go there in the first place. She later became a member of the union at the local factory, where she married the clerk, Pedro. She is the woman who was determined to change the world. Xoana's mother is the narrator of this novel. She is a violinist - like Pepa the Mole, who inherited Maricallo's violin. She is pregnant with Xoana and both anxious and eager to welcome her into the world. Marica Campo grew up in Lugo. She studied theology at Salamanca's Pontifical University and then became a teacher. She has written poetry, fiction, drama and children's literature. Memoir for Xoana is her first novel. Kathleen March is a renowned Galician specialist, Professor Emerita at the University of Maine, and the translator of important Galician authors into English, some of whom are published by Small Stations Press.

In these two poetry collections, Fossil Time (2018) and Book of Devorations (1996), the Galician poet Pilar Pallarés takes us into the nooks and crannies of time. She splices open time to reveal the innards. We are transported to another self that we didn't know existed. The poetry is so weighty that it becomes light, as if the space between the atoms had ballooned and risen upwards. Pilar Pallarés defines Galician poetry of the last thirty years. The Galician language has been a vehicle for poetry since the medieval troubadours and the lament of a woman on St Simon's Island waiting for the waves to arrive. Pilar embodies the voice of that woman, gives it a home, which is all we can do as the breath enters and leaves our lungs, hums, vibrates. Both these books received the Spanish Critics' Award for Galician poetry in the year that they were published; Fossil Time won the Spanish National Book Award for Poetry in 2019. Pilar Pallarés is considered a major poet in the Galician language. She has published five collections to date: In the Dusk (1980), Seventh Solitude (1984), Book of Devorations (1996), A Leopard Am I (2011, also available from Small Stations Press) and Fossil Time (2018). In 2019, the Galician-Language Writers Association made her a 'Writer in Her Land'. Carys Evans-Corrales has translated several major Galician authors into English. Her translations of prose by Xurxo Borrazás, Miguel-Anxo Murado and Anxos Sumai are published by Small Stations Press, as is her autobiography, Talking Girl.

An anthology of Cork-based Galician poet Martín Veiga's poetry from the last thirty years in a bilingual Galician-English edition, Alfaias na lama: Poesía selecta 1990-2020 / Jewels in the Mud: Selected Poems 1990-2020. The poems are selected and introduced by Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo; the parallel English translation is by Keith Payne.

Teo and Gordo have been friends since they were at school. Teo is sent by his father to study in the States but returns early because of a girl. Gordo decides what he needs is some action and they set out on a road trip in his boss's Dodge Charger. The question is how long can they keep going? And have they been entirely honest with each other?

Paulo's grandfather suffers from Alzheimer's. The one person he never forgets is his grandson, Paulo, even though he calls him Sinbad the Sailor and they have adventures together at sea (in the sitting room), fighting the filibusters. One Sunday, Paulo's grandfather goes missing, and Paulo will have to find out where he is.

The Luzada is a café in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia. The café has its share of cosmopolitan visitors and different languages who share the smoky atmosphere and the products of the coffee machine. Everyone's fears and aspirations seem to find a shelter in this place, albeit some are on the table, while others remain hidden.

The 'barefoot shadow' in this story is Elsa's great-aunt, Sagrario, who always goes about the house without shoes. A sense of guilt hangs around the figure of her great-aunt, which intrigues Elsa. When Sagrario dies and turns up in the coffin wearing a pair of pretty high heels, she is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery.

A boat with the charred body of a man crucified on its mast turns up at the mouth of the river in Romero, a town on the frontier. The boat belongs to the owner of the printing-firm that publishes the local newspaper. He engages Marqués, who is from the east coast and claims that he can write, to head upriver to find out the causes of the boatman’s death. His only deckhand is a mestizo boy called Cordel who’s learned his trade from the previous boatman (‘What you steer isn’t the boat, it’s the river’). They soon reach the mission, which is staffed by a single friar, Father Bento (‘He seemed to chew his words like a cow chewing grass before releasing them in short bursts’). The friar asks if Marqués has come to judge, to govern or to execute. ‘To tell,’ is his answer, ‘I’m a writer.’ Marqués, however, soon falls into a fever and has to be cured by the healing-woman from the local Aventurei Indian tribe. He realises that entering the world of the river is like clambering up a liquid wall on which there are no ledges or crannies for hands and feet to cling to. There is an obvious parallel between this narrative and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the journey is an end in itself and the reader doesn’t know what secrets the river will reveal. There is also the writer’s own personal journey in search of fulfilment through his art. Marqués and Cordel will be joined on board by Rufus the Strongman and Ela, circus workers, as they struggle to come to grips with the tangle, both real and imagined, of the jungle. Xelís de Toro is a Galician performance artist, musician and award-winning writer based in the south of England. He is the author of five works of adult fiction (Feral River being the most recent), several children’s books and a book of poetry that was published by Pighog Press in a bilingual Galician-English edition, The Book of Invisible Bridges. John Rutherford is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford. He founded and directed the Centre for Galician Studies at Oxford, which is now named after him. He has translated Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta for Penguin Classics. His other translations include The Book of Invisible Bridges by Xelís de Toro and Halos by Xosé María Díaz Castro.

Mara’s parents run the Sunset Hotel in Bico, a small town on the coast of Galicia. The Sunset Hotel is a family hotel, with old-world charm, the kind of place people come back to back year after year. Mara is almost eighteen and has taken the liberty of staying out all night and going to the disco with some friends. She has then hooked up with Tucho and brought him back to the hotel for a little intimacy, only her mother, who seems to have an inbuilt tracking device, finds out. The next day, Mara is unaware there has been an accident in front of the hotel, a hit-and-run. It just so happens that the victim of the accident is Tucho’s previous (or not so previous) girlfriend. Mara for her sins is forced to do a stint in reception, where she checks in a hesitant, but not unattractive young man, Antón, who is staying with his mother and her husband. Mara and Antón become friends and investigate together the past of Mara’s great-uncle, Paco, the previous owner of the hotel, who died some months earlier. It isn’t only Mara’s family that hides secrets, however, since Antón’s family appears to harbour some secrets of its own. The summer holidays, which had looked like being a succession of boring revision classes, turn out to be much more eventful and illuminating than anyone could have imagined. Iria Misa is the author of several young adult and children’s novels in Galician. She is the recipient of the Jules Verne Award for Young People’s Literature. She works as a secondary-school teacher.