The Carpenter's Pencil

Literature & Fiction

RIVAS,MANUEL

Genre Fiction

Vintage/Ebury (a Division of Random

A masterpiece of unusual beauty by one of Europe's greatest living writers—a brilliant evocation of the Spanish Civil War On August 19, 1936 Hercules the boxer stands on the quayside at Coruña and watches Fascist soldiers piling up books and setting them alight. With this moment a young, carefree group of friends are transformed into a broken generation. Out of this incident during the early months of Spain's tragic civil war, Manuel Rivas weaves a colorful tapestry of stories and unforgettable characters to create a panorama of 20th-century Spanish history—for it is not only the lives of Hercules the boxer and his friends that are tainted by the unending conflict, but also those of a young washerwoman who sees souls in the clouded river water and the stammering son of a judge who uncovers his father's hidden library. As the singed pages fly away on the breeze, their stories live on in the minds of their readers.

Books Burn Badly

Humor & Satire

Vintage, UK

Butterfly's Tongue

Short Stories & Anthologies

Vintage

The Low Voices

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.

Literary

A bestseller in Spain, The Carpenter's Pencil has been published in nine countries. Set in the dark days of the Spanish Civil War, The Carpenter's Pencil charts the linked destinies of a remarkable cast of unique characters. All are bound by the events of the Civil War-the artists and the peasants alike-and all are brought to life, in Rivas's skillful hand, with the power of the carpenter's pencil, a pencil that draws both the measured line and the artist's dazzling vision. Translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne.

Contemporary

The Overlook Press

The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War

Into the Wilderness

Penguin Group USA

A multi-layered tale full of tenderness, humor, and a cast of animals, birds, and people relates magical stories that make up an amalgamation of the traditions, legends, language, and history of the author's beloved homeland. Original.

In the Wilderness

A volume of sixteen short works by the author of The Carpenter's Pencil includes the tales of a traveling lingerie salesperson who is helped in a miraculous way by a rock musician, a love-addled bank robber who botches a job, and a sleepy village that is abruptly transformed by the Spanish Civil War. 10,000 first printing.

Vermeer's MilkmaidStories

Overlook Books

Dunne, Jonathan

Harvill Press

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