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About the Book

The magnificent account of a year lived on Buda, a rural island in northern Spain, The Last House Before the Sea contemplates sprawling coastal marshes, flocks of nesting seabirds, and a relentless Atlantic horizon. Author and journalist Gabi Martínez stitches scenes of the natural world alongside the day-to-day lives of the island’s residents, many of whose families have called Buda home for generations. But something is beginning to imperil the age-old rhythms of eel fishing, rice farming, and the Ebro River’s flow to the coast. The delta, that fragile mouth that connects land and sea, is shifting.

As climate change tilts the scale of a fragile coexistence and rising waves threaten to swallow fields and farmhouses, the locals must reconcile their past with their future—both beholden to a landscape that grows more endangered with each passing day.

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Praise for THE LAST HOUSE BEFORE THE SEA: 

“The mission of preservation is, like the land itself, murky and muddied, a product of progress and growth both triumphant and misguided; urgency swells and subsides like waters amid daily livelihoods. Martínez’s account, in content, structure, and style, mirrors this nuance and complexity, resisting myopic quick fixes and even easy catastrophizing. A steady, tempering, enigmatic chronicle of a polarizing, and ultimately personal, ending.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“The Last House Before the Sea is a revelation . . . a prophetic meditation on the aching precarity of our impossibly beautiful world. Martínez transforms the island of Buda into a microcosm of our world and our future if we do not find in ourselves the love to act. A profound book by one of our finest writers.”

— Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This is How You Lose Her

“There’s much to enjoy here for lovers of nature writing.”
— Publisher’s Weekly

“One of the most extraordinary cases of the new travel literature. . . . A cross between Laurence Sterne and Paul Theroux.” 

— Andrés Barba, El Mundo

“Deltas are conversations between forces so much larger than the self: between land and sea, between saltwater and fresh, and, in today's climate changed world, between the past and the future. Gabi Martínez pays watchful attention to all who occupy one such landscape in northeastern Spain, asking, how do we hold on to what has defined us even as it disappears beneath our very feet? The result is a thoughtful mix of elegy, prayer, and poetry, and in this day and age, we need all three.”

— Elizabeth Rush, author of The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World

“Gabi Martínez has invented a new literary genre: one that speaks of nature from within.”

— Kirmen Uribe, author of Bilbao–New York–Bilbao

“From the Nile to the Ganges to the Mississippi, deltas not only form a vertebral column throughout human history, but are also essential sources of biodiversity in the planet’s balance. The Last House Before the Sea addresses this fascinating and often overlooked topic with exceptional originality, certain of the urgency of its testimony. Like Claudio Magris with the Danube, Gabi Martínez offers his life experience, erudition, and sensitivity on a journey to the heart of the Iberian Mediterranean, which unveils before our eyes the overwhelming evidence of the climate crisis as a collapse of the natural spaces that sustain life on Earth.”

— Michel Nieva, author of Dengue Boy

“The Last House Before the Sea is a book to reconnect with nature, with naturalist literature, with the vibrant story of a present that yearns for a different, better future. Time passes, the year 2023 slips away, but another will come. In The Last House Before the Sea, however, as if it were an ecological thriller, time is the killer, and everything points to it getting away with murder.”

— Ginés J. Vera, La Gonzo Magazine

“Gabi Martínez has written his best nonfiction work to date, no doubt about it, but it’s as action-packed as a novel. Monologues and voices as vivid as those in theater, and all the beauty of lyric poetry that moves anyone who delves into the pages of his book.”

— Chus García, Revista Mercurio

“A monumental book, outstanding, unusual, magnetic, rich, thoughtful, intense, and fascinating.”

— Jordi Cervera, Diari de Tarragona

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gabi Martínez is a prolific journalist, screenwriter, and author of both fiction and nonfiction books. His work has received numerous awards and has been translated into ten languages. The Last House Before the Sea was chosen as the best book of 2023 by the literary magazine WMagazine; a film adaptation is already in progress. El País has called him the “Delta Force of nature literature.” He is the director of the LiterNatura Festival (which received a UNESCO award, the Serondaya award, and the award granted by Biosphere Reserves to the best project in the Conservation of Natural and Cultural Heritage), a founding member of the Caravana Negra and Lagarta Fernández associations and of the Urban and Territorial Ecology Foundation; and the co-director of the Invisible Animals project. He lives in Barcelona, where he was born.

About the translator

Ezra E. Fitz has translated over twenty books, including narrative nonfiction by Grammy-winning musician Juanes and Emmy-winning journalist Jorge Ramos, as well as literary fiction by Alberto Fuguet and Eloy Urroz. His translation of Forgiveness by Chiquis Rivera became an instant New York Times bestseller. Fitz served as an instructor with the University of Illinois’s Program in Applied Translation, and provided all translation services to El Chapo (2017), a joint-scripted TV miniseries for Netflix/Univisión Story House. He was a 2010 Resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow with the Kenyon Review Literary Translation Workshop. He lives with his wife and two children in Tennessee.

BOOK DETAILS

Paperback ISBN: 9781632064035 • $22
Publication date: Nov. 11, 2025
5.5" x 8.25" • 416 pages
Adult Nonfiction: Ecosystems & Habitats / Coastal Regions & Shorelines / Essays & Travelogues / Environmental Conservation & Protection / Ecology
Rights: North America, Audio