» City of Barbastro LXII International Short Novel  Prize

‘I’ve been asked to write a blurb for the jacket of this devastating novel, which knocked out the jury for the Ciudad de Barbastro literature prize, and it makes me blow my top in a rage because it’s impossible to define this magnificent short novel in two lines. What can I say? That it’s a post-apocalyptic novel whose brave author has imagined that, rather than some vague nuclear catastrophe, the cause of the disaster is instead the violent global victory of Catholic fundamentalism?

Should I say that I read it all in one go and that tears of emotion welled up in my eyes in the last few pages and that at the same time this denouement scared me? Should I say that I ended up loving and, it goes without saying, admiring the protagonist? Should I say that we are all The Captain? Should I say that those who love definitions will not be able, try as they might, to classify this apocalyptic–engagé–emotional–politically-radical–tender–anticlerical–melancholic–beautiful novel? No.

All I can say to you is that if you consider yourselves 21st-century readers and you believe in the literature of ideological resistance, and are interested in novels that ask profound questions it’s frightening to answer, then this is the novel for you.’ Fernando Marías