A far-reaching story of an outcast and his bookstore: a home to forbidden books, political dissidents, and cultural smugglers all brought to vivid poetic life “Rivas is a master… His pages bloom like flowers, swerving in unpredictable arcs toward a light-source that is constantly moving.”  —Bookforum The Last Days of Terranova tells of Vicenzo Fontana, the elderly owner of the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it's set to close due to the greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, Vincenzo spends the night in his beloved store filled with more than seventy years of fugitive histories. Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novel ferries us back to Vicenzo's childhood, when his father opened the store in 1935, to the years that the store was run by his Uncle Eliseo, and to the years in the lead-up to the democratic transition, which...

The Low Voices is a novel about life, it is life itself telling stories, it is the memory of the quiet voices of the people I got to know.The Low Voices draws on a patchwork of memories from Rivas's early life under Franco. There's his beloved elder sister, María; his mother, the verbivore; his father, a construction worker with vertigo; and a supporting cast of local priests, chatty hairdressers, wolf hunters and monstrous carnival effigies. The book is full of wonderful personal stories, set against a background of the ravages of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath at home, and the wider world as Coca-Cola sets up a factory nearby and news comes in of men landing on the moon.A brilliant coming-of-age novel from one of Spain's greatest storytellers, The Low Voices is a humorous and philosophical take on memory, belonging, and the nature of storytelling itself.