Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: No Prompt

Since there is still no prompt this week, I opted to feature works of Spanish literature after featuring works of French and German literature in the previous weeks. This aligns with my pivot toward European literature, following my initial focus on works of Asian literature for the first half of the year. Without ado, here are works of Spanish literature I am looking forward to. To be more specific, the Spanish literature featured in this weekly update pertains to the body of work of writers who were born in Spain, i.e., it excludes works from other Spanish-speaking countries.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you choose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Seven Houses in France
Author: Bernardo Atxaga
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2012 (2009)
No. of Pages: 250

Synopsis: 

1903, and Captain Lalande Biran, overseeing a garrison on the bank of the Congo, has an ambition: to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafes of Paris.

His glamorous wife Christine has a further ambition: to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad.

At the Captain’s side are an ex-legionnaire womaniser, and a servile, a treacherous man who dreams of running a brothel. At their hands the jungle is transformed into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. But everything changes with the arrival of a new officer and brilliant marksman: the enigmatic Chrysostome Liège.

Title: The Prisoner of Heaven
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translator (from Spanish): Lucia Graves
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Publishing Date: 2012 (2011)
No. of Pages: 278

Synopsis: 

Barcelona, 1957. It is the week before Christmas in the Sempere & Sons bookshop. Daniel Sempere has married the love of his life, Bea, and they have had a son whilst their partner in crime, Fermin, is busy preparing for his wedding to Bernarda in the New Year. Just when it seems as if luck is finally smiling on them, a mysterious figure with a pronounced limp enters the shop. He insists on buying the most expensive volume on display – a beautiful illustrated edition of The Count of Monte Cristo – and then proceeds to inscribe the book with the words ‘For Fermin Romero de Torres, who came back from the dead and who holds the key to the future’.

Who is this man and what does he want of Fermin? The answer lies in a terrible secret that has lain hidden for two decades, an epic tale of imprisonment, betrayal, murder and love that leads back into the very heart of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

Title: A Heart So White
Author: Javier Marías
Translator (from Spanish): Philip Gabriel
Publisher: Margaret Jull Costa
Publishing Date: 2012 (1995)
No. of Pages: 279

Synopsis: 

Juan knows almost nothing of his father Ranz’s interior life. But when Juan marries, he’s compelled to consider the past anew and to ponder what he doesn’t really want to know. As family secrets – their possible convenience, their ultimate price, and even their possible civility – hover, A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence; Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitor light into shadows and onto the costs of ambivalence as it chronicles the relentless power of the past.

Title: Out in the Open
Author: Jésus Carrasco
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2017 (2013)
No. of Pages: 226

Synopsis: 

A searing dystopian vision of a boy’s flight through an unnamed, savage country, searching for sanctuary and redemption – the bestselling debut from one of Europe’s rising literary stars.

A young boy has fled his home. He’s pursued by dangerous forces. What lies before him is an infinite, arid plain, one he must cross in order to escape those from whom he’s fleeing. One night on the road, he meets an old goatherd, a man who lives simply but righteously, and from that moment on, their fates are tied together.

Out in the Open tells the story of this journey through a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A world where names and dates don’t matter, where morals have drained away with the water. In this landscape the boy – not yet a lost cause – has the chance to choose hope and bravery, or to live forever mired in the cycle of violence in which he was raised. Jésus Carrasco has masterfully created a high–stakes world, a dystopian tale of life and death, right and wrong, terror and salvation.

Title: What We Become
Author: Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Translator (from Spanish): Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
Publisher: Atria Books
Publishing Date: June 2016 (2012)
No. of Pages: 453

Synopsis: 

A sweeping tale of love, adventure, and intrigue from the acclaimed author of The Queen of the South and The Club Dumas.

In 1928, aboard the Cap Polonio – a lavish transatlantic cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires – Max Costa locks eyes with Mecha Inzunza across the first-class ballroom. They are an unlikely match. He is a thief, sleek and refined, hired to dance with unaccompanied passengers. She is the elegant wife of an accomplished composer, accustomed only to the luxuries of the elite. But as they embrace in a fiery tango, a steamy and dangerous love affair ignites – following them from the ship’s gentle sways in the Atlantic night to the seedy decadence of Buenos Aires. Yet as quickly as their affair begins, the two lovers are torn apart.

In Nice, 1937, Max and Mecha’s lives intersect for a second time. Although much has changed over the last nine years, they rekindle their dalliance with ease. But in the wake of a perilous mission gone awry, Mecha looks after her charming paramour until a deadly encounter with a Spanish spy forces Max to flee, leaving them uncertain as to whether their paths will ever cross again.

Now, decades later in Sorrento at the height of the Cold War, Max once again runs into trouble – and Mecha. The years have taken their toll on Max Costa, but age hasn’t diminished his passion for her. The opportunity to succumb to their undeniable attraction has arrived at last, but with KGB agents on Max’s trail, the small glimmer of hope becomes increasingly dim.

A mesmerizing tale of love and adventure, espionage and honor, What We Become is Arturo Pérez-Reverte at his finest. This richly rendered love story opens a window into the lives of his always unforgettable characters with elegant prose reminiscent of his beloved novel The Club Dumas. Sweeping through time and across borders, What We Become proves that love, much like a great novel, is timeless and enduring.

Title: The Nocilla Trilogy
Author: Agustin Fernandez Mallo
Translator (from Spanish): Thomas Bunstead
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: Dream – 174; Lab – 149; Experience – 189

Synopsis: 

A landmark of twenty-first-century Spanish literature, Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy – made up of the novels Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, and Nocilla Lab – is a project for our time. Reading takes the form of literary channel surfing: we flick through an audacious network of chopped-up stories, recycled texts, and mixed-media collages, and try to find the signal in the noise, reflecting the dizzying search for meaning that characterizes life in our digital age.

The globe-spanning narratives that explode across the trilogy take us from a lone poplar tree in the Nevada desert to a barnacle-covered cliff in Galicia, Spain, through scientific treatises and film-editing manuals, personal journals and comic strips. The books are full of references to indie cinema, theoretical physics, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers, and the decadence of the novel. And yet for all the freewheeling, fragmentary swagger, a startling order emerges and takes hold. Peerless in its daring, The Nocilla Trilogy charts a hidden and exhilarating cartography of contemporary experience.