The first of Reig’s acclaimed-in-Spain titles to be translated into English (and shortlisted for the Booker-like Premio Fundación Lara in 2003) is at its core a witty, thrill-a-minute detective story, but it ranges exhilaratingly across genres. The book opens...

How can the words of the past help heal the horror of the present? For as long as she can remember, Barbara Spiel has always found solace in books. Born in Germany and having come of age in a...

It’s the late sixties, the last dark years of Franco’s dictatorship: Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuel’s country estate in...

The wicked kill…but the dead speak Journalist Emmeline Kirby and her jewel thief/insurance investigator husband Gregory Longdon were in the mood for intrigue at the theater. However, murder was only supposed to take place on stage. All too soon,...

Would you trust Ludo da Portovenere? From the trading colony of Goa to the royal courts of England and Spain, Ludo da Portovenere fulfils dangerous secret commissions for three kingdoms on his own terms, and for his own reasons....

Beautifully written and told in an irresistible voice, Bad Habit is a powerfully moving coming-of-age novel following a young trans woman in 1980s Madrid. An unnamed young trans woman grows up in a working-class suburb that has no place...

Fantasies, or are they premonitions, of a great wave, an impending apocalypse, threaten to swamp a young woman trapped in a slowly curdling relationship. From the outside it all looks good—the casually elegant apartment, the cocktail parties, the impressive,...

This war has drawn international attention. In a dress rehearsal for World War II, fascists support the Nationalists, while communists have come to the aid of the Republicans. Atrocities have devastated both sides. It is at this moment, when...

1941. Hitler rampant. Spain neutral. Madrid, like Casablanca, the launching pad for spies from all sides. The most daring and audacious is codenamed ‘Eldorado’. Young, inexperienced, hotheaded, he had no right to survive, let alone succeed. Now his network...

Galdos’s four-part Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-7), the masterpiece among his almost 80 novels, tells the turbulent story of two women, their husbands and their lovers, set against the intricate web of dynastic alliances and class contrasts of Madrid in...