There is no better gift than a good book that transports the reader to distant places, that makes them reflect or with which they have a good time. For this reason and, on the occasion of the celebration of Father’s Day, we offer a selection of books to give away on Father’s Day , among which are novels , essays and manuals focused on life, education or literature, and that are ideal to give away and have in every house.
Contents
Independence
Melchor Marín returns once again, the mosso d’esquadra from the previous novel by Javier Cercas, Terra Alta, who became a hero when he confronted the Islamic terrorists who attacked Catalonia. He returns to Barcelona to investigate the blackmailing of the city’s mayoress with a sex tape. Melchor must dismantle an extortion that it is not known if he pursues simple economic gain or political destabilization, and, to do so, he enters the circles of power, a place where cynicism, unscrupulous ambition and corrupt brutality reign. An absorbing and wild novel, populated by memorable characters, which becomes a devastating portrait of Barcelona’s political-economic elite, but above all a furious plea against the tyranny of the owners of money and the masters of the world.
- Author: Javier Cercas
- Publisher: Tusquets Editores
Clara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel after receiving the Nobel Prize and in which he returns to science fiction. The narrator is the curious Klara, an AA (Artificial Friend) specialized in childcare. She spends her days in a store, waiting for someone to buy her and take her home. While she waits, she contemplates the exterior from the window, she observes the passers-by, their attitudes, their gestures, their way of walking, and she witnesses some episodes that she doesn’t quite understand.
Klara is a singular AA, she is more observant and more given to asking questions than most of her peers, very human questions: What awaits her in the outside world when she leaves the store and goes to live with a family? Does she have a good understanding of behaviors, sudden mood swings, emotions, human feelings? Ishiguro once again reveals his great fabulatory power, the exquisiteness of his prose brimming with nuances and that unique ability to explore the essence of the human being, address important issues and ask disturbing questions: What defines us as people? What is our role in the world? What is love?
- Autor: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Publisher: Anagram
Thomas Nevinson
Two men, one in fiction and one in reality, had the opportunity to kill Hitler before he started World War II. Based on this fact, Javier Marías explores the opposite face of ‘You will not kill’. If those men perhaps should have shot the Führer, is it possible to shoot someone else? As Tomás Nevinson’s narrator comments, “you can already see that killing is not so extreme or so difficult and unfair if you know who.” The protagonist that Marías has chosen for his new novel is an old acquaintance for the writer’s followers, since he is the husband of Berta Isla (her previous work of his). In ‘Tomas Nevinson’, the author delves into the limits of what can be done,
Emerson’s orchard
After the success of his latest novel ‘Lluvia fine’, Luis Landero resumes the memory and readings of his particular personal universe where he left them in his also memorable ‘The balcony in winter’. And he does so in a book in which he once again masterfully weaves together the memories of the child in his town in Extremadura, the adolescent who has recently arrived in Madrid or the young man who is starting to work, with stories and scenes lived in books with the same passion and greed than in the real world.
In ‘Emerson’s Garden’, characters from a still recent time appear, but who seem to belong to a distant time, and as full of life as Pache and his bowling alley in the middle of nowhere, hyperactive women who support families like grandmother and the narrator’s aunt, quiet men who suddenly reveal amazing secrets, or candid boyfriends like Florentino and Cipriana and their enigmatic courtship at dusk. Landero turns all of them into pairs of the protagonists of Ulysses, congeners of the characters in the novels of Kafka or Stendhal, and companions of the most brilliant reflections on writing and creation in a unique mixture of humor and poetry, of evocation and charm.
- Author: Luis Landero
- Publisher: Tusquets
The writer
The prestigious Icelandic writer Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir returns with a novel with which she has won the Médicis étranger Award, the Icelandic Booksellers Award and has been a finalist for the Icelandic Literature Award and also for the Icelandic Women’s Award. The protagonist of it is Hekla, a twenty-something who has always wanted to be a writer and decides to go live in Reykjavik in the early sixties. There she will work as a waitress and share a home first with her friend Jón John, a homosexual man who wants to work in the theater with all his might, and then with a frustrated poet with whom she maintains a sentimental relationship. In a country of poets, where every house is full of books and there are more writers per capita than anywhere else,
- Author: Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
- Editorial. alfaguara
Warburg & Beach
An original graphic novel written by Jorge Carrión and illustrated by Javier Olivares about bookstores, libraries and crossed destinations that will delight book and literature lovers. During the first decades of the 20th century, the German historian Aby Warburg and the American bookseller Sylvia Beach carried out two outstanding intellectual projects that today form part of the cultural mythology of modernity: the Warburg Library, in Hamburg, where the the fascinating Atlas Mnemosyne, and the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris. Both redefined the relationship between readers and writers, art, books and literature. The parallel destinies of both characters dialogue in these pages with those of other revolutionary figures in the world of art and writing, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, pioneer of feminism and mother of the creator of Frankenstein, the London publisher Joseph Johnson, the New York bookseller Frances Steloff or the cosmopolitan and conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp. The lives of all of them intertwine through the echoes and metaphors proposed by this original graphic novel, a dazzling narrative essay between cartoons and collage.
- Authors: Jorge Carrión and Javier Olivares
- Editorial: Salamandra Graphic
Literature
First novel by screenwriter Daniel Remón, winner of the Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2020 for ‘Outdoors’, a film based on the novel by Jesús Carrasco. Half homage to books, half autobiography, ‘Literature’ is defined by the author himself as an impossible cross between ‘The Princess Bride’ and the acclaimed ‘Ordesa’, by Manuel Vilas. A story within a soap opera within a family saga (that of Remón himself) within a reflection on the profession of writing. A love letter to a child and to all the children we once were. One night, Teo, a three-year-old boy, asks his uncle Daniel to tell him a story. But not just any story, but one that includes a boy named Teo, a red car, a good and a bad witch, a monster, a suitcase and a lot of money.
- Author: Daniel Remon
- Publisher: Seix Barral
Philosophy in the face of discouragement
An essay that dissects our time with a surgical eye to show us the seams of an increasingly complex world. Doctor in Contemporary Philosophy, Ruiz analyzes a society like the current one in which the pressure to stand out is presented as a pit from which we are exhorted to get out, where the self-imposed need of the ‘check-list’ are obligatory rituals to achieve happiness, a society in which we accumulate experiences to vomit them ipso facto on social networks.
In it, moreover, the painful gap between the real self and the virtual self widens at times and the tension of demanding full fulfillment and productivity from free time, thus blocking the possibility of enjoyment, is permanent. All these elements, if they are not analyzed under the logic of critical thinking, they will be in charge of configuring a personality doomed to experience chronic discouragement. And before this, few drugs are more effective than philosophy.
- Author: Jose Carlos Ruiz
- Publisher: Destination
On the brevity of life, leisure and happiness
This volume by the Cordovan philosopher Lucio Anneo Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD), the highest representative of Stoic philosophy along with Epictectus and Marcus Aurelius, brings together three treatises (‘De brevitate vitae’, composed in the year 49 , ‘De vita beata’, written around 58, and ‘De otio’, dated around 62), which examine some of the crucial issues of ethics of all times: the relationship between pleasure and virtue, the search for happiness, the concept of nature applied to the human ideal, the supremacy of reason, the use of time and the dignity of retirement.
- Author: Seneca
- Publisher: Cliff
one hundred nights
The latest Herralde Novel Award explores the different forms of love, some radical and extreme, and the various sexual behaviors, some equally radical and extreme. Through its characters, the novel talks about loyalty, infidelity, unspeakable desires, taboos, half-truths, and deceit that surround our relationships. And as a game it incorporates a series of adultery files that the author asked some Spanish writer friends to write for him (Edurne Portela, Manuel Vilas, Sergio del Molino, Lara Moreno and José Ovejero), in a stimulating exercise in literary promiscuity.
- Author: Luisgé Martin
- Publisher: Anagram
lessons in stoicism
How did the Stoic philosophers really think? What do they teach us for modern life? In this entertaining and accessible essay, John Sellars, Professor of Philosophy at University of London’s Royal Holloway , weaves together the key insights of the three great Roman Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—also offering snapshots of their fascinating lives. Its objective is to help apply this philosophy in today’s life in aspects as varied as knowing how to face adversity, making better use of time, controlling our emotions, the problem of life and death, or guiding ourselves in our relationships with others. Sellars has no doubt that the ideas of these philosophers can ultimately guide us in our search for a more pleasant existence.
- Autor: John Sellars
- Editorial: Taurus
Why are screens and social networks ‘sweeping’ among adolescents? When is the best time to buy a mobile or let your child use other technological devices? This book has content adapted both for young people who love being in front of a screen and for families who don’t know if they are doing things right. A tool with activities and illustrated examples to share the two points of view and transform the experience with the screens into something positive for both.
- Author: Alicia Banderas
- Editorial: Lunwerg
light biography
In line with his previous literary installments (‘Forgetting Oneself’, ‘Enthusiasm’ or the acclaimed ‘Biography of Silence’) Pablo d’Ors presents what is considered his definitive work. We all need transparent reflections: stories that help us see things again as they are. As surely we saw them when we were children. Images and ideas that make it clear that life is not far or outside, but inside and here. An essay designed for all spiritual seekers and, therefore, written from a cultural rather than a confessional perspective. A path, as radical as possible, for enlightenment, understood as something simple and everyday. A kind of poetic manual of interiority, in which some of the countless images and metaphors outlined by the evangelists and which are authentic mirrors of human identity are presented. A book to review one’s life and to discover, after the noise of the shadows, that we would not look for the light if we were not, after all, beings of light.
- Author: Pablo d’Ors
- Editorial: Galaxy Gutenberg
Atlas of unusual frontiers
The borders make up the map, often political, of the countries and some of them have a surprising story that is worth telling. And that is what this manual is about, which shows those borders distributed throughout the world and that, for different reasons, have divided the same territory, transforming its inhabitants into citizens of different countries or that, on the contrary, have united one enclave with another. even if they are separated by many kilometers of distance. Packed with illustrations and explanations in great detail, this book is a gem for lovers of geography and… politics.
- Author: Zoran Nicolic
- Publisher: Geoplanet
Wisdom
How to behave in a civilization that threatens to collapse? The philosopher Miguel Onfray has it clear: reading the Romans, whose philosophy is based on examples and not on confusing theories. This essay answers very specific questions: How to use time? How to be firm in pain? Is it possible to age well? How to tame death? Should we have children? What does it mean to keep my word? What does it mean to love with love or friendship? Can we possess without being possessed? Should we worry about politics? What does nature teach us? How is a morality of honor? For Onfray, wisdom is turning our gaze to Ancient Rome and witnessing the death of Pliny the Elder and the gladiator fights, witnessing grandiose suicides and ridiculous philosophers’ banquets, of sublime friendships and murders that changed the course of events; live history and accompany Seneca and Cicero, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. In his opinion, while waiting for the catastrophe, he can always live like a Roman: that is, upright.
- Author: Michel Onfray
- Publisher: Paidos
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