"The Wonders is a poet's novel, delicate but strong, impressing its
images firmly on the imagination." --Hilary Mantel
LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
NOW TRANSLATED INTO FIFTEEN LANGUAGES
From award-winning Spanish poet Elena Medel comes a mesmerizing new
novel of class, sex, and desire.
Already an international sensation, The Wonders follows Maria and
Alicia through the streets of Madrid, from job to job and apartment to
apartment, as they search for meaning and stability in a precarious
world and unknowingly trace each other's footfalls across time.
Maria moved to the city in 1969, leaving her daughter with her family
but hoping to save enough to take care of her one day. She worked as a
housekeeper, then a caregiver, and later a cleaner, and somehow she was
always taking care of someone else. Two generations later, in 2018,
Alicia was working at the snack shop in Madrid's Atocha train station
when it overflowed with protestors and strikers. All women--and so many
of them--protesting what? Alicia wasn't entirely sure. She couldn't have
known that Maria was among them. Alicia didn't have time for marches;
she was just trying to hang on until the end of her shift, when she
might meet someone to take her away for a few hours, to make her forget.
Readers will fall in love with Maria and Alicia, whose stories finally
converge in the chaos of the protests, the weight of the years of
silence hanging thickly in the air between them. The Wonders brings
half a century of the feminist movement to life, and launches an
inimitable new voice in fiction. Medel's lyrical sensibility reveals her
roots as a poet, but her fast-paced and expansive storytelling show
she's a novelist ahead of her time.
