mari.laan@toledo.ee

Each day before work María Dolz stops at the same café. There she finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Observing their seemingly perfect life helps her escape the listlessness of her own. But when the man is brutally murdered and María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, what began as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement. Invited into the widow’s home, she meets–and falls in love with–a man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly encased in a metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, chance and coincidence, and above all, with the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told.

Translation by Ruth Sepp, 2024

Her: “Falling in love is also accumulating nostalgia for the future.”

This novel by Isaac Rosa tells the story of two people who, like many others, fall in love only to find themselves fighting for what they once had. Not even family and dreams save love from today’s difficulties: precariousness, doubt and the romanticized version of love that we have been told about. Rosa writes, above all, in a way that touches very humanly:  the metaphors give a sensitive poetry to a completely mundane story and the dynamic dialogue between a man and a woman determines the rhythm of the action and emotions, sometimes slowing down, other times intensifying. The story is presented in retrospect with an inverted chronology: from the failure of the relationship to the first meeting, passing through the happy ending. “Happy ending” was published in Spanish in 2018 and was selected as the best book of the year by five different cultural publications.

ISAAC ROSA (1974) is a Spanish writer whose novels have been translated into several languages ​​and whose novels have been adapted to film. Of all the awards he has received, the most notable was the Rómulo Gallegos award (2005), which is awarded to  two best works of the year in the entire Spanish language literary space. Rosa is characterized by being an author with good style and aimed at a reader with demanding literary tastes.

Translation by Marianne Ots, 2024

“He checked his parachute and launched himself into the Sea of Sarcasm.”

 The body of a transvestite strangled with a silk ribbon is found in a forest in Havana. The young man wearing a theatrical red dress turns out to be the son of a respected diplomat. Little by little, the hidden and extravagant world of sexual minorities begins to open up to the murder investigator Mario Conde. A political and erotic, theatrical and literary, poetically sentimental and politically incorrect journey begins in Havana in the 1980s and Paris in the 1960s, where Conde is guided by the legendary playwright and director Alberto Marqués, who was canceled by the communist regime at the height of his fame. ”Havana Red” is the third installment in Leonardo Padura’s Four Seasons series — also known as the Havana Quartet. One novel corresponds to each season, although they can be read in any order.

LEONARDO PADURA (1955), is a Cuban writer who, like many of his contemporaries, grappled with the decision of whether to remain in Cuba or seek opportunities abroad during the tumultuous period at the close of the 1980s and the onset of the 1990s. Despite the harsh realities faced by Cubans due to the collapse of Soviet support, Padura opted to stay in his homeland. Throughout his career, Padura has garnered numerous accolades for his literary contributions. Among the most prestigious are the Cuban National Literary Award (2012) and the Princess of Asturias Award (2015), one of Spain’s preeminent international literary honors.

Translation by Maarja Paesalu, 2023

A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they’d ever overlooked her in the first place.

Translation by Jüri Kolk, 2022

“The Instruction Manual,” the first chapter, is an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format. “Unusual Occupations,” the second chapter, describes the obsessions and predilections of the narrator’s family, including the lodging of a tiger-just one tiger- “for the sole purpose of seeing the mechanism at work in all its complexity.” Finally, the “Cronopios and Famas” section delightfully characterizes, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, “those enemies of pomposity, academic rigor mortis and cardboard celebrity – a band of literary Marx Brothers.”

Translation by Ruth Sepp, 2022

When Alma’s beloved grandmother dies, the world becomes a quiet place. Her mother sits at the window, looking out. Her father’s days weigh on his shoulders as he goes to the store, cooks a meal. One day Alma’s classmate Diego approaches her at recess and says that, like her, he misses his abuelo – his grandpa, who died in the spring. Soon Diego and his family invite Alma and her parents to a big party where they remember the dead.

Celebrating the Mexican Día de Muertos, Alma and her family experience a new way to grieve and remember loved ones who have died in this story, joyful in its sadness and sensitively illustrated by Sanna Pelliccioni.

Translation by Ave Leek, 2021

Twenty-four-year-old Lissette Delgado was beaten, raped, and then strangled with a towel. Marijuana is found in her apartment and her wardrobe is suspiciously beyond the means of a high school teacher. Lieutenant Conde is pressured by “the highest authority” to conclude this investigation quickly when chance leads him into the arms of a beautiful redhead, a saxophone player who shares his love for jazz and fighting fish.

Translation by Maarja Paesalu, 2021

Rocco is still reeling from the death of his best friend’s girlfriend, who was murdered as she slept in his bed. There’s no doubt that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and paid the ultimate price. With the identity of the hitman still unknown, a cloud lingers over Rocco, dulling his judgment and leaving this anti-hero exposed to other threats. For Rocco has stepped on one too many people’s toes over the years, namely the mafia that is still being rooted out in Aosta.

Translation by Cathy Laanela, 2021

Here is the story of two families in small-town Basque country, pitted against each other by the ideology and violence of the terrorist group ETA, from the unrelentingly grim 1980s to October 2011 when the group proclaimed an end to its savage insurgency. Erstwhile lifetime friends–especially the generation of parents on both sides–the two families become bitter enemies when a father of one is killed by ETA militants, among them one of the sons of the other family. Told through a succession of more than one hundred short sections devoted to a rich multiplicity of characters whose role in the story becomes clear as one reads. Homeland brilliantly unfolds in nonlinear fashion as it traces the consequences for the families of both the murder victim and the perpetrator. Aramburu alludes only obliquely to a historical matrix even as he focuses on the psychological complexity of his characters while building nearly unbearable narrative tension.

Translation by Maria Kall, 2020

Around the ashes of the grandfather, which will rest forever under the water, sixteen people reconstruct the history of their family as well as their own. From the grandmother to the youngest granddaughter, from the memory of the village in which the elders were born and raised before being forced to abandon it in the face of its imminent destruction to the stories and feelings of the youngest, the story runs like a flow successive consciousness, like an existential and polyhedral kaleidoscope to which the surface of the water serves as a mirror.

Translation by Madis Kuuse y Mari Laan, 2020

Lieutenant Mario Conde is suffering from a terrible New Year’s Eve hangover. Though it’s the middle of a weekend, he is asked to urgently investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rafael Morin, a high-level business manager in the Cuban nomenklatura. Conde remembered Morin from their student days: good-looking, brilliant, a “reliable comrade” who always got what he wanted, including Tamara, the girl Conde was after. But Rafael Morin’s exemplary rise from a poor barrio and picture-perfect life hides more than one suspicious episode worthy of investigation. While pursuing the case in a decaying but adored Havana, Conde confronts his lost love for Tamara and the dreams and illusions of his generation.

Translation by Maarja Paesalu, 2019

Eugéne Chignon, a young French governess, travels to New York in 1932 to look after a little girl, Alice, whose unbridled passion for the world created by Lewis Carroll has caused her parents to forbid her to read his books. Eugéne’s first mission is to prevent Alice from learning that Alice Liddell, the real Alice who inspired Lewis Carroll, is visiting the city. The nonsensical comedy and the historical facts have their place in this novel, in which the nonsense, the nonsense so emblematic of Carroll, ends up making a lot of sense.

Translation by Ehte Puhang, 2018

A spectacularly rich novel spanning fifty years in the history of a nation, a family, and a love affair. Set in the noble Mexican city of Puebla, this is the beautifully romantic story of Emilia Sauri, a charmed young woman in love with two men–one, a quixotic activist who heeds the call of the revolution, the other, a stable and devoted doctor who helps Emilia realize her own gift for healing.

Translation by Maria Kall, published in 2018

On a summer day at the arcade, timid sixteen-year-old Ignacio Cañas encounters two charismatic rebels: El Zarco (“Blue Eyes”) and his gorgeous girl, Tere. Entranced, he crosses the border into their dangerous world, becoming their partner in crimes that quickly escalate. Twenty-five years later, Tere materializes in Cañas’s office, needing help. Cañas has settled back into middle-class life, becoming a successful defense lawyer. Zarco has matured into a convict of some infamy. Yet somehow, with new stakes, this three-way affair will begin again. With his usual brio, Javier Cercas surveys the borders between right and wrong, respectability and criminality, and to what extent we can pass between them—or determine on which side we ultimately fall. This brilliantly plotted tale firmly establishes him as one of the most rewarding novelists writing today.

Translation by Riina Roasto, 2018

Forced to leave his beloved native Rome because of irregularities in his police work, Rocco Schiavone is sent to the Aosta Valley, which, despite its location on the Italian peninsula, is the closest thing to landing on Mars for a Southerner like him. When a woman is found dead in her house and the aftermath of what appears to be a violent robbery spreads in the gloom, Deputy Chief Schiavone resists the temptation to believe the obvious. Schiavone will put into practice his own particular blunt method, based on intuition, cunning, an unwavering loyalty to his trusted people and a certain tendency to take the law into his own hands.

Translation by Cathy Laanela, published in 2018

When jazz pianist Santiago Biralbo meets the wife of an American art dealer, he begins not only an obsessional love affair, but also an odyssey that will strip him of his identity in his quest to understand love and music.

Translation by Triin Lõbus, published in 2018

Born and raised in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, deputy prefect of police Rocco Schiavone hates skiing, the mountains, snow, and the cold. The only shoes he wears are Clarks; he scorns any kind of winter clothing. A body has been discovered beneath the tracks of a snowcat on a piste above Champoluc. And Rocco has to get to work.

Black Run (2013) is the first novel with the protagonist Rocco Schiavone written by the italian Antonio Manzini (1964), a screenwriter for the cinema, an author of TV series, and actor.

Translated by Cathy Laanela, published in 2017

Am Rand (2016) by the Austrian-born musician and writer Hans Platzgumer is the author’s most successful novel so far and was long-listed for the German Book Prize.

Hans Platzgumer (1969) has studied to be a musician and compose, he is co-founder of the Grammy-nominated band HP Zinker in the late 1980s and is member the punk band Die Goldenen Zitronen since the late 90s. Platzgumer found his way into literature through music: he wrote down, as hackwork, the colourful episodes of his life as a musician. Platzgumer’s style is laconic and precise, fascinating in its simplicity, his humour dry and very black.

Translated by Piret Pääsuke, published in 2017

Clarice Lispector’s first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was published in 1944, when its author was only nineteen years old. An immediate success, it became an acknowledged watershed in Brazilian literature, catapulting it into the literary arena of European modernism. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue consciously echo James Joyce as Lispector recalls first the childhood and then the adult years of the middle-class Joana, her unhappy marriage and its dissolution.

Translated by Riina Roasto, published in 2016

A shape-shifting extraterrestrial named Gurb has assumed the form of a famous pop-singer and disappeared in Barcelona’s back streets. His hapless commander, desperately trying to find him, records the daily pleasures, dangers, and absurdities of our fragile world, while munching his way through enormous quantities of churros. No stone is left unturned in the search for his old pal Gurb.

Eduardo Mendoza’s works have always been highly praised by critics and very successful with readers, as demonstrated by the fact that the majority of his novels and stories have been translated into many languages. In 2016 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize.

Translated by Maarja Paesalu, published in 2016

In her novel Betibú, Claudia Piñeiro uses her typical human touch to combine an exciting thriller with an astute portrait of the Argentinean media and society. When the crime journalist Jaime Brena hears of a murder in the well-guarded community La Maravillosa, he hooks up with the famous writer Nurit Iscar, also called Betibú. She is to cover the case for the newspaper director, who also happens to be her ex-lover.

As an author and scriptwriter for television Claudia Piñeiro (1960) has already won numerous national and international prizes. According to the prestigious newspaper La Nación, Claudia Piñeiro is the third most translated Argentinean author, right after Borges and Cortázar.

Translated by Maria Kall, published in 2016

The Time in Between (published in English also as The Seamstress) by María Dueñas is a historical espionage novel that revolves around the figure of Sira Quiroga, a seamstress who moves to Morocco with her boyfriend right before the uprising that would lead to the Spanish Civil War. There, after many setbacks, she will open her own sewing workshop. The novel sold more than a million copies and has already been translated into more than 25 different languages. It was adapted for television as a populaar series.

María Dueñas is also an academic author and was a professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Murcia.

Translated by Kristiina Raudsepp and Mari Laan, published in 2016

In End of the Game (1956), his second collection of short stories, Julio Cortázar (1914 – 1984), one of the major figures of the Latin American boom, arrives to his essence: the game. This text could be the manifest of the author: the game as one of the objectives of the life and one of its most important components. In these stories Cortázar opens the door to the magical reality which can only be reached by taking part in the game.

Translated by Ruth Sepp, published in 2016

Jennifer Clement (1960) grew up in Mexico City, Mexico. She is the author of three novels and several books of poetry. Clement is the President of PEN International; human rights issues have motivated her writing.
Her novel Prayers for the Stolen (2014) involved over ten years of research on the stealing of young girls in Mexico. The book is an illuminating and affecting portrait of women in rural Mexico, and a stunning exploration of the hidden consequences of an unjust war.

Translated by Pirkko Põdra, published in 2015

Javier Cercas (1962) is professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona. He collaborates regularly in the newspaper El País.
Soldiers of Salamis (2001) is a novel that reached unprecedented success in bookshops, with readers, writers, and critics. Cercas takes us on an investigation of historic events that is passionate because its purpose is to unravel a secret that refuses to be revealed, an essential secret that concerns not only Spain’s most uncomfortable past, but above all, the human condition.

Translated by Mari Laan, published in 2015

Rigoberta Menchú (1959) is an indigenous woman from Guatemala who has dedicated her life to promoting indigenous rights in the country. She is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.
In her children book The Girl from Chimel (2003), written together with her friend Dante Liano, Menchú’s stories of her grandparents and parents, of the natural world that surrounded her, and her retelling of the stories that she was told, present a rich, humorous, and engaging portrait of the lost world of her childhood.

Translated by Maris Kilk, published in 2015

Alvydas Šlepikas (1966) is a Lithuanian writer and poet. He is also a scriptwriter and  playwright as well as a popular actor and stage director. Šlepikas has worked as executive editor of the cultural weekly Literatura ir menas, where he is currently in charge of the  literature section.
My Name is Maryte (2012) is the story of a journey to post-war Lithuania,  where ”wolf children” – German orphans, the victims of resettlements – roam.   The book broke the silence that surrounded the tragedy of the inhabitants of Eastern Prussia in Poland and Lithuania.

Translated by Tiina Kattel, published in 2015

Enrique Vila-Matas (1948) is one of the most prestigious and original writers in contemporary Spanish fiction. He is the author of several books which, as a trademark of his genius, mix different genres.

The plot of his Dublinesque (2010), a witty and contemplative novel full of wistful irony, follows an ex-publisher in crisis who, under the influence of a revelatory dream, sets off for Dublin where, accompanied by three of his writer friends, he wants to hold a funeral for the era of the printed book – the Gutenberg Galaxy.

Translated by Triin Lõbus, published in 2014

Elena Poniatowska (1932) is one of the most powerful and important voices of Spanish American literature and journalism. In 2013, she was awarded the Premio Cervantes Literature Award.
In the novel Dear Diego, Love from Quiela (1978) the Russian exile and painter Angelina Belo writes from the cold and impoverished post-war Paris to Diego Rivera, her spouse of over ten years.

Translated by Mari Laan, published in 2014

Eneko Bolumburu, Rafael M. Calvo Díaz, Neftalí Peral and Miguel Villoslada are four Spanish guys who have been living for years in Estonia. In order to share their enthusiasm for good food and their gastronomic traditions, they have compiled this Spanish cook book with their favourite recipes adapted to Estonian taste and local ingredients.

Published in 2013