Six Great Reads for a Day of Books & Roses – Needs Buttons

Pilar Adón’s Of Beasts and Fowls is a hypnotic exploration of grief, sisterhood, and the porous boundary between civilization and the wild. When Coro, an artist undone by loss, stumbles upon an isolated commune of women in the remote estate of Bethany, she enters a realm where ritual, silence, and desire intertwine in unsettling ways. Adón’s prose—precise, lyrical, and steeped in symbolism—transforms this cloistered world into an allegory of memory and metamorphosis. Celebrated for its formal daring and emotional depth, the novel has been awarded Spain’s Premio Nacional de Narrativa (2023), the Premio de la Crítica Española, the Cálamo Otra Mirada, and the Francisco Umbral Prize for Book of the Year.

María Medem’s Land of Mirrors is a visual-poetic meditation on solitude, memory, and the reverberations of love. Rendered in lush, saturated palettes, formal precision, and minimalist text, the work resists easy allegory even as it evokes mythic longing. Land of Mirrors invites the reader to inhabit a dreamscape where visual and lyrical elements speak as forcefully as narrative, and where the question becomes less “What happens?” than “What echoes remain?”

Munir Hachemi’s Living Things is a stark, unnerving portrait of youth adrift in the machinery of global labor. Four friends leave Madrid for seasonal work in France, only to encounter exploitation that strips away illusion and idealism. Written with brutal clarity and formal restraint, the novel blurs autofiction and reportage to expose the violence underlying modern work and life. Winner of the English PEN Translates Award (2023).

Layla Martínez’s Woodworm is a dark, lyrical fable of class, rage, and the supernatural. Set in a decaying house in rural Spain, it follows a grandmother and granddaughter haunted by the ghosts of poverty and vengeance as the walls themselves seem to breathe with memory. Blending gothic horror with social realism, Martínez transforms the domestic into a site of resistance and reckoning. Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Laura Ferrero’s Los Astronautas (The Astronauts) begins with the discovery of a long-lost family photograph, which forces the narrator—previously disconnected from her origins—to reconstruct a hidden, fragmented past. The novel probes the silences, erasures, and contingencies through which identity and memory are woven, transforming the domestic into a territory of speculative excavation.

In Euphoria Days, Pilar Fraile imagines a near-future Madrid where algorithms purport to measure and optimize happiness. María, a data analyst, becomes haunted by worms in a recurring nightmare just as her research begins to fracture; around her orbit five other characters—each seeking meaning in sex, motherhood, addiction, control—grapple with the illusion of autonomy in a society increasingly mediated by metrics. It is a satirical, existential ensemble narrative about freedom, subjectivity, and what it means to live when every moment can be quantified. Fraile’s Días de euforia won the Premio de la Crítica de Castilla y León.