Synopses & Reviews
Losing her son in a lorry accident, a woman abandons her lover and her life on the Mexican border and becomes a domestic servant in Madrid; following an awkward ménage-à-trois, a timber agent is blackmailed into introducing his lover's boyfriend to his best client; a depressed, misfit French teacher rejects the overtures of students and would-be lovers; all the while sharp-eyed young Araceli watches over everything from her decrepit apartment.
Nesting stories within stories, setting Bret Easton Ellis among his fellow mutts and enigmatic, love-hungry, dying Alba Cambó among her several lovers, Lina Wolff can really throw her readers a sucker punch.
Upstairs/downstairs distinctions blur as Wolff's adroit and subtle novel turns the tables, allowing servants and subordinates to dominate their masters. With a Bolaño-esque humor Wolff asks, what chance does love have in this dog-eat-dog world?
Synopsis
An award-winning Barcelona novel with Bolaño-esque humor: including lovers, a Mexican maid, Marilyn (a cat), and Bret Easton Ellis (a dog).
Synopsis
At a run-down brothel in Caudal, Spain, the prostitutes are collecting stray dogs. Each is named after a famous male writer: Dante, Chaucer, Bret Easton Ellis. When a john is cruel, the dogs are fed rotten meat. To the east, in Barcelona, an unflappable teenage girl is endeavouring to trace the peculiarities of her life back to one woman: Alba Cambo, writer of violent short stories, who left Caudal as a girl and never went back.
Mordantly funny, dryly sensual, written with a staggering lightness of touch, the debut novel in English by Swedish sensation Lina Wolff is a black and Bolano-esque take on the limitations of love in a dog-eat-dog world.
Synopsis
This brilliant translation by Frank Perry won the 2017 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the 2019 Bernard Shaw prize
At a run-down brothel in Caudal, Spain, the prostitutes are collecting stray dogs. Each is named after a famous male writer: Dante, Chaucer, Bret Easton Ellis. When a john is cruel, the dogs are fed rotten meat. To the east, in Barcelona, an unflappable teenage girl is endeavouring to trace the peculiarities of her life back to one woman: Alba Camb , writer of violent short stories, who left Caudal as a girl and never went back.
Mordantly funny, dryly sensual, written with a staggering lightness of touch, the debut novel in English by Swedish sensation Lina Wolff is a black and Bola o-esque take on the limitations of love in a dog-eat-dog world.
Synopsis
Winner of the 2017 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
Winner of the 2019 Bernard Shaw Prize for its translation
At a run-down brothel in Caudal, Spain, the prostitutes are collecting stray dogs. Each is named after a famous male writer: Dante, Chaucer, Bret Easton Ellis. When a john is cruel, the dogs are fed rotten meat. To the east, in Barcelona, an unflappable teenage girl is endeavouring to trace the peculiarities of her life back to one woman: Alba Camb , writer of violent short stories, who left Caudal as a girl and never went back.
Mordantly funny, dryly sensual, written with a staggering lightness of touch, the debut novel in English by Swedish sensation Lina Wolff is a black and Bola o-esque take on the limitations of love in a dog-eat-dog world.
About the Author
Lina Wolff has lived and worked as a translator and writer in Sweden, Italy, and Spain. This novel won the prestigious Vi magazine literature prize, and was shortlisted for the Swedish Radio prize for Best Novel of the Year.
Frank Perry has translated many of Sweden's leading writers. His work has won the Swedish Academy prize for the introduction of Swedish culture abroad and the drama translation prize of the Writer's Guild of Sweden.