Blogs in December 2025

Cautery 10th December 2025

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,...

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Bad Habit 4th November 2025

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...

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A Bookseller in Madrid 15th June 2025

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...

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The Cook of Castamar 22nd January 2025

NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES SHE IS the daughter of a disgraced physician, forced to work in the kitchen of a great eighteenth-century Spanish house, hiding her intense agoraphobia from everyone. HE IS the Duke of Castamar, one of...

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From Madrid to Heaven 17th December 2024

In these stories Madrid is the apex of a triangle stretching to Lisbon and Tangier. Characters meet the unexpected in a borderland between Europe and Africa, from the fall of dictators to a surge in trans-Mediterranean migration. An Arab...

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