Rosa Montero (Spain, 1951)
Rosa Montero is a Spanish journalist and contemporary fiction author. Montero was born in Madrid in 1951. Daughter of a bullfighter and a housewife, Montero suffered from tuberculosis as a child, what forced her to remain at home between the ages of five and nine; she began reading and writing extensively during that period.
In 1976, Montero graduated from Madrid's School of Philosophy and Arts and she began working as a journalist at El País, a national newspaper, where she has been working for the last four decades. Years later she published her first novel Crónica del Desamor (Chronicle of Enmity), in 1979. Montero is a very influential Spanish author and has won numerous awards as a novelist and as a journalist. Many of her books remain to be translated into English.
“We always feel our reality isn’t enough. So we consume drugs and give ourselves artificial memories; we want to escape from the confinement of our lives. But I assure you that the only way to resolve the conflict is to learn to accept it and find your own place in the world.”
Tears in Rain
The Cannibal’s Daughter
Lucía and Ramón have been together for more than ten years, more for commodity than for love. They decide to spend the New Year in Vienna but just before their flight departures, Ramón disappears. After contacting the police, Lucía starts her own search for Ramón with the help of two singular men: Andrés, a mysterious young, and Fortuna, an old anarchist. What starts as a search for her husband soon becomes...
The Absurd Idea of Not Seeing You Again
“This book is about life… passionate and joyful, sentimental and quizzing”. After the death of her husband, Rosa Montero wrote this book, a personal memoir but also a tribute to the collective memory of the last decades in Spain. With an intimate narrative, the book talks about men and women, sex and death, the redeeming power of literature and the wisdom behind the simple pleasures of life. Presented with photos...
Beautiful and Dark
Baba is an orphaned girl taken to live with her relatives in a slum called El Barrio. There she meets her grandmother Bárbara, the matriarch of the family, her aunt Amanda, submitted to her violent husband, and Chico, her teenager cousin. Trying to cope with the mystery and violence of the adult world around her, Baba is drawn to the Lilliputian Airelei, who fascinates her with fantastic tales that mix myth and memory...
The Delta Function
In 2010, Lucía Ramos, a one-time film director, is dying of cancer. She keeps two diaries, one chronicling the last months of her life, the other Easter Week 1980, when her first and only film opened. In that crucial week of her life, she was abandoned by one of her two lovers and, deciding to give up her difficult, independent lifestyle, moved in with the other. The tone in both diaries is disappointingly similar; melancholy, reflective...