The Wonders

by Elena Medel, Thomas Bunstead (Contribution by), Lizzie Davis (Contribution by), Rebecca Gibel (Read by)

Overview

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

LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798200880935
Publisher:	Workman Publishing Co. Inc
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Elena Medel is a Spanish poet and the founder and publisher of La Bella Varsovia, an independent poetry publishing house. Medel was the first woman ever to win the prestigious Francisco Umbral Prize, for her debut novel The Wonders, which was also longlisted for the Finestres Award and has been translated into twelve languages. She published her prizewinning first collection of poetry, My First Bikini, when she was sixteen years old.

Thomas Bunstead has translated Enrique Vila-Matas, Aixa de la Cruz, Eduardo Halfon, Yuri Herrera, and Rodrigo Fresán. His own writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review Daily, and TheIndependent on Sunday.

Rebecca Gibel is an award-winning stage, television, and voice actress. The narrator of over fifty audiobooks, Rebecca is facile in a wide variety of genres. Rebecca has worked across the country at theaters such as Trinity Rep, Cleveland Play House, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Intiman Theatre, and the Arden Theatre Company. She holds a BA from the College of William & Mary and an MFA in acting from Brown University/Trinity Rep.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/31/2022

Spanish poet Medel’s remarkable English-language debut moves from Francoist Spain into the present day, tracing a family’s fractured ties over three generations. In 1969, María is forced to leave her hardscrabble Córdoba home when she gets pregnant by a married man at 16. After handing over infant Carmen to her family to care for, she moves to Madrid and makes do with backbreaking menial jobs. Her efforts to send money home while saving enough to bring the child to live with her fail, as do her attempts to forge a long-distance maternal bond. By the time she can afford to have Carmen join her in the 1980s, the teenager refuses. As a young woman, Carmen marries a restaurateur and raises her daughter, Alicia, in comfort until the crippling debts her husband’s incurred drive him to suicide and the family into poverty when Alicia is 13. Like María, Alicia moves to Madrid, where she drops out of school, enters a dull marriage, works dead-end jobs, and carries on a generally self-destructive lifestyle. She’s also haunted by dreams about her father’s death, which become stranger and more violent as time passes. She doesn’t want to know María, the grandmother she was told abandoned their family, while María has too little information to find Alicia on her own. By 2018, a women’s support group that María has helped build organizes a women’s march that crosses through Alicia’s neighborhood, increasing the chance their paths will cross. Arresting characterizations and vivid prose fuel Medel’s searing look at the impact gender, class, and financial hardships have on working-class Spanish women’s lives as the country is buffeted by wider cultural shifts. It adds up to a powerful story. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

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

“A mesmerizing read. Medel’s prose is hypnotic—it’s hard to believe this is her first novel. I was completely engrossed in this story, in the shadow each generation casts on the one that comes after it, in the tension between caring for oneself and caring for others.”
—Avni Doshi, author of the Booker Prize finalist Burnt Sugar  

“A remarkable English-language debut . . . Arresting characterizations and vivid prose fuel Medel’s searing look at the impact gender, class, and financial hardships have on working-class Spanish women’s lives as the country is buffeted by wider cultural shifts. It adds up to a powerful story.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review) 

“Prizewinning Spanish poet Medel’s debut novel examines the lives of three generations of women in Madrid with an unsparing eye . . . The translation from Spanish of Medel’s unvarnished look at three constrained lives is unsentimental and direct.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)  

“Medel's sensitive debut, charged with feminist insights but never losing sight of the particularities of its characters, weaves together the stories of two women whose deeper connection only becomes clear as the novel approaches its end . . . Spanish novelist Medel astutely examines the forces—political, economic, familial, and personal—that have shaped the two women's richly detailed lives. Though penned in by class and gender, often in ways they do not recognize, Maria and Alicia come across not as simple victims but as struggling survivors, still open to change.”
—Booklist (starred review) 

“I read The Wonders is one page-turning night. Yet to describe Elena Medel’s debut as gripping is to miss the point. An unflinching story about class, sex, family, and working women everywhere, this book achieves a rare combination of novelistic plotting and virtuosic interiority that left me rooting for Maria and Alicia as if I’d known them all my life." 
—Anna Solomon, author of The Book of V.  

“Vivid and mesmerizing. The translators knocked it out of the park and the prose just oozes off the page.”
—Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

“A stylistic triumph . . . Reminiscent of Elena Ferrante and Virginia Woolf, The Wonders is a stunning debut about the intersection between poverty and womanhood.”
—BookBrowse 

“Dreamlike yet precise, internal yet expansive, The Wonders moves between generations of women with a clear-eyed empathy for their struggles to be free. Medel's characters are hungry, angry, imperfect, and completely alive.”
—Adrienne Celt, author of Invitation to a Bonfire and End of the World House   

“The Wonders brings to life several generations of working women: it’s a serene and impious novel that puts class, feminism, and the eternal complexity of family ties at the fore.” 
—Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in The Fire and the Booker Prize finalist The Dangers of Smoking in Bed  

“Reminds you of the audacity of Virginia Woolf . . . One of Spain’s best poets has become one of its most important novelists.”
—El País

From the Publisher

06/01/2022

In 1969, María leaves her small town, and her child, behind to head to the city of Madrid. There she finds work, always taking care of others. Years later, María's granddaughter Alicia is unhappily married to a man always pressuring her to have children, go on bike rides, or act more like other couples they know, and she often seeks escape through encounters with random men. Then in 2018, Alicia finds herself working at a train station snack shop as women from around the country gather to protest the unfairness they face in work and life. This is a lyrical and beautifully written book that follows three generations of a family of working women, highlighting the struggles that women have always faced in a patriarchal society. Rebecca Gibel adds beauty to the book, which showcases the author's poetic writing. VERDICT A literary novel of international interest, this award-winning book from Spanish poet Medel (My First Bikini) provides an engaging look at the feminist movement from its beginning to the struggles of today.—Elyssa Everling

Library Journal - Audio

★ 2022-01-26
Prizewinning Spanish poet Medel’s debut novel examines the lives of three generations of women in Madrid with an unsparing eye.

A series of interlocking narratives about María, Carmen, and Alicia—all working-class women who find themselves in the capital city for varied reasons—the novel traces transformations in Spanish life, culture, and politics from the end of the Franco era to the 21st century. The lives of Medel’s three protagonists, however, remain tied to their troubling economic circumstances, and a telling epigraph from Philip Larkin (“Clearly money has something to do with life”) provides a clue to the direction the women’s stories will take. A teenage pregnancy forces unmarried María out of her family’s modest provincial home to the city, away from her baby, Carmen, and into a series of demanding, physically exhausting jobs. Carmen’s apparently good fortunes turn after the suicide of her debt-burdened husband, and she and her school-age daughters struggle in the aftermath. Alicia, one of Carmen’s daughters, is haunted by her father’s death and floats through life with a lackluster retail job, stultifying marriage, and a habit of picking up random men for brief, distracting sexual encounters. Economic insecurity forces all three to compromise dreams and life choices, and some notes of their lives echo in the others (albeit in ways unrecognized by the women). The 2018 Women’s March in Madrid frames the beginning and end points of the novel and allows Medel to bring some of her major players together on one stage even if they are acting in their own dramas. The translation from Spanish of Medel’s unvarnished look at three constrained lives is unsentimental and direct.

Money changes everything (if you can get your hands on it).

Kirkus Reviews