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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > The Low Voices

The Low Voices

The Low Voices draws on a patchwork of memories from Rivas’s early life under Franco. There’s his beloved elder sister, María, who dies young; 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. 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.

Author

Manuel Rivas

Manuel Rivas

Books

All is Silence

The Low Voices

Manuel Rivas was born in Coruña in 1957. He writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known in Spain for his journalism, as well as for his prize-winning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter’s Pencil and Books Burn Badly. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Translator

Jonathan Dunne

Jonathan Dunne

Books

All is Silence

The Low Voices

Jonathan Dunne was educated at Oxford University and holds advanced diplomas in Spanish, Galician, and Bulgarian. His many translations include: from Spanish, two novels by Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co and Montano’s Malady, nominated for the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; from the Galician, In the Wilderness, nominated for the 2004 Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and The Carpenter’s Pencil, nominated for the 2003 International IMPAC Award, both by Manuel Rivas; from Catalan, In the Last Blue by Carme Riera; and from Bulgarian Iana Boukova’s poems in Take Five 07. He is the author of The DNA of the English Language (2007) and a collection of poetry entitled Even Though That (2004).

Published by

Harvill Secker, 2016
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The Low Voices draws on a patchwork of memories from Rivas’s early life under Franco. There’s his beloved elder sister, María, who dies young; 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. 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.

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