A blog tour! The Wonders

Many thanks to Algonquin Books and Pearl Cadigan for the invite to the blog tour for this intriguing fiction title.

About the Book:

“The Wonders is a poet’s novel, delicate but strong, impressing its images firmly on the imagination.”​ —Hilary Mantel  

NOW TRANSLATED INTO FIFTEEN LANGUAGES 

From award-winning Spanish poet Elena Medel comes a mesmerizing new novel of class, sex, and desire. 

Already an international sensation, The Wonders follows Maria and Alicia through the streets of Madrid, from job to job and apartment to apartment, as they search for meaning and stability in a precarious world and unknowingly trace each other’s footfalls across time. 

Maria moved to the city in 1969, leaving her daughter with her family but hoping to save enough to take care of her one day. She worked as a housekeeper, then a caregiver, and later a cleaner, and somehow she was always taking care of someone else. Two generations later, in 2018, Alicia was working at the snack shop in Madrid’s Atocha train station when it overflowed with protestors and strikers. All women—and so many of them—protesting what? Alicia wasn’t entirely sure. She couldn’t have known that Maria was among them. Alicia didn’t have time for marches; she was just trying to hang on until the end of her shift, when she might meet someone to take her away for a few hours, to make her forget. 

Readers will fall in love with Maria and Alicia, whose stories finally converge in the chaos of the protests, the weight of the years of silence hanging thickly in the air between them. The Wonders brings half a century of the feminist movement to life, and launches an inimitable new voice in fiction. Medel’s lyrical sensibility reveals her roots as a poet, but her fast-paced and expansive storytelling show she’s a novelist ahead of her time.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Medel’s poetic sensibility is evident in rhythmic, incantatory prose, yet she also looks at the world through a good novelist’s magnifying glass . . . Medel makes room for her characters to grow into their power as women, a power they discover does not in fact lie in money.”
—The New York Times Book Review 

“The Wonders is a poet’s novel, delicate but strong, impressing its images firmly on the imagination.” 
—Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

“A poetic portrait of Spanish womanhood . . . The lives of two working-class women are interleaved in a bold debut novel with flashes of beauty.” 
—The Guardian  

“Medel captures the plight of working women who are limited by class and gender dynamics . . . Small acts of protest add up to each woman’s larger fight for freedom from the confines of men, money and everlasting grief . . . Though they have made mistakes and been lonely, they have survived. And that triumph they claim for themselves.”
—NPR  

“The Wonders is the long-awaited novel debut by one of the best poets of the new Spanish generation. The Wonders is a novel about money—a novel about how the money we don’t have defines us. It is also a novel about care, responsibilities, and expectations; about the precariousness that does not respond to the crisis but to the class, and about who will tell the stories that define our origins and our past.”
—Conde Nast Traveler 

“A captivating novel . . . Medel’s poetic voice shines.”
—Karla Strand, Ms. magazine

The author