Five essential books of the eternal Almudena Grandes

The prolific Almudena Grandes She excelled with many works during her prolific career, but certain books were especially successful, sometimes focusing on portraits of women with enormous personalities such as the protagonists of The ages of Lulu O Malena is a tango name and always with a special sensitivity to the memory of those defeated in the Civil War. These are five of his essential books, in chronological order:

1. ‘The Ages of Lulu’ (1989)

This erotic novel gave great fame and success, then a young writer who won the award The vertical smile of Tusquets, and saw his book adapted for the cinema by Bigas Luna at the movies (1990) and translated into 19 languages. Located in the Madrid of the Transition, it recounts the vicissitudes of Lulú, a young woman who falls in love with a friend of her brother while almost a girl and ends up establishing a relationship with him dominated by sexual experimentation and emotional control.

2. ‘Malena is a tango name’ (1994)

It was also adapted to the cinema, in this case by Gerardo Herrero, with the face of Ariadna Gil. It recounts the life of Malena, who Since she was a child, she has suffered when comparing herself to her perfect twin sister, Reina. She receives as a gift from her grandfather an emerald that will one day save her life and begins to investigate the trajectory of other members of her bourgeois family, misfits and cursed before her.

3. ‘The difficult airs’ (2002)

Another of the great editorial successes of Almudena Grandes, this novel that connects with the Galdosian realist tradition -as the critics highlighted- Its central argument is the love story between two characters who meet in an urbanization on the coast of Cádiz where they have settled trying to flee from a difficult past in Madrid that leads them to “live together as the only survivors of a shipwreck.”

4. ‘The frozen heart’ (2007)

The political commitment of Almudena Grandes is very clear in this long novel (919 pages) that the author prepared meticulously by documenting about the Spanish Civil War and interviewing people marked by the conflict. It is the story of two families, a Falangist and a Republican, and how their memory is projected in the lives of the protagonists, a man and a woman, when their life intersects.

5. ‘Ines and joy’ (2010)

This book is the first in the ambitious series Episodes of an endless war which was to be composed of six books and was truncated when five had been published (the last is Frankenstein’s mother, 2020). In them he pays tribute to the National episodes from Benito Pérez Galdós, but focusing on the lives of characters who tried to resist against Franco. This novel is inspired by the true story of some communist guerrillas who wanted to liberate Spain from the dictatorship by entering from the Arán Valley in 1944. (I)