Eduardo RUIZ SOSA

CANDAYA,  2022, 464 p. LITERARY FICTION, spanish (Mexico)

A journey through the scenes of the disappeared people in contemporary Mexico.
“Estado Crítico awards in 2022, in its Narrative section, the work by Eduardo Ruiz Sosa El libro de nuestras ausencias (Candaya, 2022). For its daring formula for telling the story of the violence of disappearances in Mexico. For its atrocious lyricism. For maintaining the pain in those who read it and for managing to unite them in the recovery of all the dead of drug trafficking.” Estado Crítico, Crítica literaria diletante.
A totally personal narrative form, similar to a Homeric poem, a long ancient song. Brilliant.

Orsina is a theatre actress who becomes seriously ill. Her disappearance messes up the lives of those around her, especially that of Teoría Ponce and Róldenas, brothers who are heirs to a bankrupt printing press and who devote themselves to searching for her, confronting the atrocious world of the disappeared people. Between attempts to preserve the printing press, theatrical performances and a cast of characters as absurd as they are real, the novel takes us from the violent present to the maddening past of a historical figure marked by delirium and death: José de Gálvez, Visitor General of New Spain, incarnated in an old theatre actor who plays him in the last role of his life.
The book Of Our Absences is a story about the disappearances in the north of Mexico, the violence of drug trafficking, the clandestine graves in the desert and the sierra. A journey of multiple voices and stories, of times that overlap and interweave. It is the intimate story of some absences, of mothers searching for their children, of spaces that have to be transformed in order to continue to exist.

Original Title
El libro de nuestras ausencias

Extract in spanish
English Sample by Will Noah available

Territory of representation
World Wide

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Isabel-Cristina ARENAS SEPULVEDA

CANDAYA,  2022, 240 p. LITERARY FICTION, spanish (Colombia)

A first novel that explores the mysteries of family, death and the debts of the past.

Isabel is a living memory and, although everything that surrounds her causes deep sadness in those who knew her, loving her seems to be obligatory. Fearful of the possibility of repeating a life, the narrator, who is named after her grandmother, needs at the same time to get closer to her and to distance herself from her. But sometimes certain destinies are marked and it is not always easy to deviate from what others decide.
And They Were a Single Shadow is a luminous novel, full of plants and birds, mirrors and clocks, hammers, knives and threads, where objects are what they are and something more. Isabel-Cristina Arenas Sepúlveda attempts to reconstruct a world through familiar voices that often contradict each other and leave open gaps and many questions. Tobacco and shoe manufacturing, Isabel and her husband Alfredo’s trades, weave this story full of secrets and some wounds, which begins in the 1920s in Bucaramanga and ends in the present day in Barcelona.

Original Title
Y eran una sola sombra

Extract in spanish
Sample in english by Sarah Booker

Territory of representation
World Wide

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Daniela ALCÍVAR BELLOLIO

CANDAYA,  2022, 288 p. LITERARY FICTION, spanish (Ecuador)

“A luminous and illuminating work, furiously tender” María Bastarós.

What The Future Was is the story of a disintegration, the chronicle of a devastating crisis that threatens a marriage, a house, sanity, and unleashes in the narrator an intimate and profound reflection in which writing and life, landscape and affection, memory and future intersect.
What The Future Was is also the tracing of a family genealogy that incorporates a personal archive: the traces of a past – sometimes luminous, sometimes murky – with which the protagonist tries to give shape to her lineage and reconcile herself with the present. From the recovery of childhood and adolescence to the reconstruction of the shadowy figure of the writer grandfather, this novel explores our relationship with others, with objects, animals and the landscape, focusing especially on the different ways in which we recover life, after those radical breaks that seem to destroy everything.

Javier López Menacho, Coordenadas Literarias, 29 marzo 2022
“Desde un yo indefinido, íntimo, confesional, tierno, autoparódico, sensible, precioso en definitiva, es como Alcívar sigue creando, a fuego lento, una obra personalísima, única en el mejor sentido de la palabra.”

Original Title
Lo que fue el futuro

Territory of representation
World Wide

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Marta APONTE ALSINA

CANDAYA, 2022, 208 p., NOVEL, spanish

National Novel Prize of the Pen Club of Puerto Rico 2007

Marta Aponte Alsina is considered the great contemporary master of Puerto Rican narrative. Cristina Rivera Garza included her in a selection of 12 must-read Latin American women authors, published in Publisher’s Weekly magazine in 2018.

At once a novel of family saga, a travelogue, a story of initiation and growth, a hybrid narrative that draws on a variety of resources, The Happy Death of William Carlos Williams is a book that takes us into the amazement of artistic creation, into the relationships of a young woman’s desire to live as an artist and the conflicts that this represents in the 19th century society.

The Happy Death by William Carlos Williams is a novel about the enigmatic Raquel Helena Hoheb, perhaps one of the most important Latin American painters of the 19th century and mother of the poet William Carlos Williams, who defined her as a woman of irrepressible imagination. Her life well exemplifies the rich history of Caribbean migrations: from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, to the Paris of the World’s Fair, and from there to Rutherford, New Jersey, where she lived for more than half a century the conflict between her role as a family woman and her artistic vocation.
Marta Aponte Alsina, one of the most outstanding authors in Puerto Rican literature, continues an inverse route to the writing of a biography: she gives voice to silence, dares to mend gaps and add detours to the work of the author of Paterson, in order to discover that all biographies are connected and that all pasts are projected onto our lives.

“The Happy Death of William Carlos Williams is thus a novel about the mother and about art, about how a son inherits an artistic legacy. It is, therefore, a novel about that elusive but central concept of tradition. The novel questions not only what is a literary tradition but rather what it means to write a literary tradition”. Carlos Fonseca.

Original Title
La muerte feliz de William Carlos Williams

Press and blurbs :
Press note in spanish
“Heiress to Sebald, but also to the Frenchman Pierre Michon, whose biographical passion she shares to perfection, the Puerto Rican Marta Aponte Alsina has managed to weave one of the most resonant works in the Caribbean and Latin American sphere. ” Carlos Fonseca, Revista Otra Parte.
“Aponte, one of the most personal and innovative literary voices in the Caribbean and Latin America, gives us through this novel the opportunity to approach the ideology of this era as embodied in his work, in this decade of the 21st century.” Juan J. Berríos Concepción, Diálogo.

Territory of representation
World Wide

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