Restless is thrilled to publish the first English translation from the major Spanish novelist Cristina Sánchez-Andrade, who has been called “one of the most powerful female voices Spanish literature has produced” (La Razón). The Winterlings (Nov. 1, 2016) is Sánchez-Andrade's enchanting breakthrough novel, mixing the magic of 1950s-era Hollywood with the eery folklore of Spanish Galicia and the lingering smoke of the Spanish Civil War. After a childhood in exile, two odd sisters, known mysteriously as “The Winterlings,” return to their grandfather’s cottage in the Galician countryside and settle into the routines of rural living. When the sisters learn of nearby filming for Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and the call for Ava Gardner lookalikes, the chance to stand in for the most beautiful woman in the world divides their once-unified passion for Hollywood cinema and acting, threatening to sunder their close relationship. Meanwhile, the insular villagers gradually reveal themselves as grotesque (albeit charming) characters: a widow in perpetual mourning, a woman who never dies and the priest who climbs a steep hill daily to give her last rites, and a dentist who plants the teeth of the deceased in his patients’ mouths. But most unsettling of all is the revelation of the perverse business arrangement the townspeople have made with the girls’ departed grandfather.
Cristina will be visiting the U.S. Catch her at one of these events.
AUTHOR EVENTS:
November 3: Cristina Sánchez-Andrade at Wagner College
November 3: Cristina Sánchez-Andrade at Instituto Cervantes New York with Lina Meruane (New York, NY)
November 8: Cristina Sánchez-Andrade at Syracuse University
November 14: Cristina Sánchez-Andrade at Instituto Cervantes Chicago (Chicago, IL)
November 15: Cristina Sánchez-Andrade at Prairie Lights (Iowa City, IA)
By Andrés Neuman
Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Lawrence
“The most breathtaking voice in travel writing today may be that of a writer who feels ambivalent about travel itself…. ‘Perhaps the greatest travel book, the most unpredictable of all,’ Andrés Neuman suggests in the closing paragraphs of How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, ‘would be written by someone who doesn’t go anywhere and simply imagines possible movements. Facing a window that seems like a platform, the author would lift his head and feel the rush of the horizon.’ It’s a line that operates as both valedictory and epigraph…. As How to Travel Without Seeing progresses, it increasingly functions... as a set of vignettes, reflections, shards of memory or observation that add up in the only way such fragments can, as an approximation of consciousness…. This is what it means to travel now.”
—David Ullin, Barnes & Noble Review
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632060556
Publication date: Aug 30, 2016