La chica más lista que conozco
La chica más lista que conozco is a novel about shame, the complexities of consent in unequal relationships, and the limits of #MeToo. Structured as a philosophical treatise, it also interrogates female friendship in male-dominated environments, the innate beauty of knowledge, the urgency of identity formation, and the chiaroscuro of political compromise in one’s private life.
Alicia leaves her hometown to study philosophy in the Spanish capital, Madrid, sure that there she’ll find friends with whom she can speak about books and professors who can change her life. Seduced by a clique of students as clever as they are cruel, she soon discovers that knowledge is not always a virtue. In fact arrogance is what rules the classroom, and intellectual brilliance can exist alongside precarity, cynicism, and everyday strife and scruples. Through her particular coming-of-age journey, between student movements and her study of what love means according to authors like Plato and Sartre, Alicia becomes obsessed with Juan, one of her professors, despite the fact that he’s more than ten years older than her.
Following the literary phenomenon Los escorpiones, which earned the applause of legions of readers and critics alike, as well as comparisons to authors as diverse and brilliant as David Foster Wallace, Javier Marías, Mariana Enríquez, Houellebecq, Bolaño, and even Cervantes, Sara Barquinero— “the author who has knocked the literary world off its feet with a reading experience that obsesses, unsettles, and keeps you hooked until the last page” (Esquire Spain)—has become the great voice of her generation.
PRESS
«Throughout my life as an editor, Sara Barquinero is the author who has surprised me the most: with her enormous ambition and truly impressive talent, at such a young age, and her depth of emotion and capacity to evoke it readers. People have compared her to Marías and Foster Wallace: I like to think of her as a relative of Sally Rooney, Michel Houllebecq, and Ottessa Moshfegh. After the monumental, Bolaño-esque and award-winning The Scorpions, the novel that confirms her as the most important Spanish writer of her generation has arrived. I hope the world will get to read it.» —María Fasce, Fiction Director of Lumen, Alfaguara and Reservoir Books
TRANSLATIONS
France: Grasset (pre-empt)
