Nona's Room

Description

Six Gothic and uncanny stories from one of Europe's most celebrated contemporary writers of short fiction. In Nona's Room the everyday fantasies of women slowly turn into nightmare, delusion and paranoia. Cristina Fernandez Cubas takes us through a dark looking-glass into a world where things are never quite what they seem. Lurking in each of these six chilling and suspenseful short stories is a very unpleasant surprise. Nona's Room is the latest offering from one of Spain's finest contemporary writers.

Cristina Fernandez Cubas is a writer and journalist who lives and works in Barcelona. Since the publication of her first collection of short stories, Mi hermana Elba in 1980, she has stood out as a master of the genre, which is so essential to the Spanishnarrative tradition. She received the Setenil prize for short stories for her fifth collection, Parientes pobres del diablo in 2006. She has also published several short novels. Many of her works have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian,Portuguese, Turkish and Chinese but none, so far, into English.

"Masterfully blends the commonplace with the fantastic, achieving the essence and vitality inherent in the best examples of this literary genre." --Selection Panel, Premio Nacional de Literatura "Nona's Room puts together six short stories narrated by women, and it isn't long into the first story that I realized I had something unique in my hands . . . as I turned the last page, I had to go sit and focus on more mundane things to shake off my sense of being left totally off balance. When a book can provoke a reaction like that, it's one well worth reading." --Reading Avidly "There's an especially lovely story of that last, skeptical kind in Cristina Fernandez Cubas's remarkable collection . . . In these six elegant stories she's most interested in the ambiguities and periodic disturbances that plague the imagination, and reports on them with the appropriate sense of awe, even of dread." --New York Times "Cubas stories create one of the most extraordinary universes in contemporary literature, where the commonplace and the unexpected, normality and the unexplainable intertwine to offer a singular vision of human experience." --abc "There is mystery almost from the first sentence of every story. Each detail shatters our inertia and forces us to reappraise a shifting panorama." --El Pais