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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > On the Edge

On the Edge

On the Edge opens with the discovery of a rotting corpse in the marshes on the outskirts of Olba, Spain — a town wracked by despair after the burst of the economic bubble.

Stuck in this town is Esteban — much of the novel unfolds in his raw and tormented monologues. But other voices resound from the wreckage and their words, sharp as knives, crowd their terse, hypnotic monologues of ruin, prostitution and loss.

Chirbes alternates this choir of voices with a majestic third-person narration, injecting a profound and moving lyricism and offering the hope that a new vitality can emerge from the putrid swamps.

Author

Rafael Chirbes

Rafael Chirbes

Books

On the Edge

Rafael Chirbes (1949 – 2015) wrote nine novels and received the National Prize for Literature and the Critics Prize for On the Edge. ABC named him ‘the best writer of the 21st century in Spain’.

Translator

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Books

On the Edge

Out in the Open

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago. In 2008 she won the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queíroz’s masterpiece The Maias. She was awarded the Permio Valle Inclán in 2010 for her translation of Bernardo Atxaga’s The Accordionist’s Son.

Published by

Harvill Secker, 2016
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On the Edge opens with the discovery of a rotting corpse in the marshes on the outskirts of Olba, Spain — a town wracked by despair after the burst of the economic bubble.

Stuck in this town is Esteban — much of the novel unfolds in his raw and tormented monologues. But other voices resound from the wreckage and their words, sharp as knives, crowd their terse, hypnotic monologues of ruin, prostitution and loss.

Chirbes alternates this choir of voices with a majestic third-person narration, injecting a profound and moving lyricism and offering the hope that a new vitality can emerge from the putrid swamps.

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