"[Follow] the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter...

"Solitario Cisneros thought his life was over long ago. He lost his wife, his family, even his country in the late 1870s when the Rio Grande shifted course, stranding the Mexican town of Olvido on the Texas side of the border. He’d made his brooding peace with retiring his gun and badge, hiding out on his ranch, and communing with horses and ghosts. But when a gruesome string of murders and kidnappings ravages the town, pushing its volatile mix...

"Water days are busy days, grateful, laughing, thirsty days. A small village no longer has a water supply of its own, but one young girl and her neighbors get by with the help of the water man. When he comes to town, water flows like hope for the whole familia, and everyone rejoices." --publisher's website

This is "[t]he story of Julio and Emilia, two Chilean university students who, seeking truth in great literature, find one another instead. As they fall together and drift apart over the course of young adulthood, Zambra spins an emotionally engrossing, expertly distilled, formally inventive tale of love, art, and memory." --back cover

"The Colombian film director, Sergio Cabrera, is in Barcelona for a retrospective of his work. It’s a hard time for him: his father, famous actor Fausto Cabrera, has just died; his marriage is in crisis; and his home country has rejected peace agreements that might have ended more than fifty years of war. In the course of a few intense days, as his films are on exhibit, Sergio recalls the events that marked his family’s unusual and dramatic lives:...

This novella "offers a child’s-eye view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in 'the year of polio, foot-and-mouth disease, floods.' A middle-class boy grows up in a world of children aping adults (mock wars at recess pit Arabs against Jews), where a child’s left to ponder 'how many evils and catastrophes we have yet to witness.' When Carlos laments the cruelty and corruption, the evils of a vicious class system,...

"José Federico Burgos is a failed painter turned forger trapped in surreal, menacing splendour with an enormous Flemish altarpiece, and impish vagabond, and a pair of resrouceful yet intimidating twins. He drinks too much, he roams the grounds, and every day that he doesn't succeed in copying the painting, he gets a little bit closer to what's really happening behind the high garden walls." --back cover

"A free spirit who spends time near the port of Havana, where her friend Osiris is known as the 'Greek sailormen's whore,' teenager Zé becomes pregnant after a brief love affair with a captain's son her age. By the time she realizes her condition, the ship has left and the boy is gone. In her father's Cuba, an unwed teenage mother is a source of scandal and shame and a threat to his ambitions in the Party. He disowns her and brutally throws her out...