These are the booksellers’ literary recommendations for this summer

As every month, more than a hundred bookstores from the Confederation of Spanish Guilds and Spanish Booksellers Associations (Cegal) featured ten books after a vote that “reflects the enormous and comforting diversity on a small scale of themes, tones, and sounds that reach your business.” .

Specifically, they chose for this month three novels by foreign women, two Spanish essays, two children’s and a youth book This shows how the comic is mostly promoted in the field of children’s and youth literature.

So, these are the recommendations:

• ‘Effingers’ by Gabriele Tergit and a translation of Carlos Fortea (Asteroid Books), a book that chronicles the saga of two upper-class Jewish-German families over four generations. A “novel” that “conquered” bookstores for the “depth” of portraits of this bourgeois environment, and above all of temperamental women.
• ‘Ash River’ by Rafael Reig (Tusquets Editores), a novel starring a wealthy seventies who has had a stroke and enters a nursing home in the Sierra de Madrid, where he spends his time reading classical literature, drinking lots of iced gin, and pondering the news about his confusion. an unstoppable epidemic.
• ‘Annihilation’ by Michel Houllebecq and Jaime Zulaika’s translation (Anagrama) is a story set in an almost dystopian present, where Houellebecq is once again “surprised” and plays with references to time and the story of different members of a family “stands out”. A novel that combines the sadness of “could have” with hope. Followers of the French writer will find a novel that nearly doubles the number of pages we are used to, but retains its usual “insipid and sober” style.
• ‘The Kabul Complex’ by Marta Rebón (Destiny). For Cegal’s booksellers, Marta Rebón, one of their “favorite translators”, also a “fantastic writer”, returns with “a pamphlet” in which she explains something “overwhelmingly as present as the war against Ukraine”. The invasion of Russia goes back to the farthest origins of the conflict.
• ‘Bodily’ by Marta Sanz (La Bella Warsaw), a compilation of all the poems by this author, whom booksellers have described as “very successful” since they read Sanz’s entire work “in order” in verse, confirms something he has been saying for years: writing poetry. where he feels “free”. And the truth is, booksellers have already suggested that this will be a title they will “defend with tremendous complicity.”
• ‘night in the pocket’ by Pedro Mañas With illustrations by Mariana Ruiz Johnson (Kalandraka). One of today’s greatest Spanish authors of children’s literature, Mañas showcases his poetic side in this book for “high quality, musicality and symbolism” booksellers. Therefore, this collection of poems did not go “unnoticed.”
• ‘Stinky Dog and His Gang’ by Colas Gutman With illustrations by Marc Boutavant and translation by Jan Martí (Blackie Books). The new title of this epic, which already has many readers among children and is characterized by its “sensitivity, humor and endless enthusiasm”. They made a “very clever and poetic” argument against homogeneous groups and in favor of friendly relations based on shared feelings and experiences.
• ‘The lion over the door’ by Onjali Q Raúf and Marcelo E. Manzzanti’s (La Galera) translation is a new novel for adolescents in which the British author once again raises issues of social importance such as immigration or racism. On this occasion, he deals with a subject such as people forgotten by history. A historical juvenile novel, “something out of the ordinary” and at the same time a story of friendship, discovering one’s own roots, racism in the classroom and intergenerational understanding.

• ‘by Natasha’ Koldo Almandoz and Aritz Trueba (New Nine) is a “social” and “costumbrista” showcasing the dangers of social networks and how sexually explicit videos go viral.

• ‘The Sixth Weapon’ by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt (Editor’s Standard). The recent National Award for Best Editorial Work titles the work of these Americans, which earned five nominations for the Eisner Awards (the comics Oscars). The comic takes the reader into the American Wild West, but cannot find the typical western, as these vignettes mix fantasy, horror and supernatural among outlaws, chases and conflicts.