'This is an old and wicked island. An island of Phoenicians and merchants, of bloodsuckers and frauds' Expelled from her convent school for kicking the prioress, and abandoned by her father when her mother dies, rebellious teenager Matia is sent to live with her domineering grandmother on the island of Mallorca. In the hot, oppressive stillness of an adolescent summer, she learns to scheme with her cousin Borja, and finds herself increasingly drawn to the strange outsider Manuel. But civil war has come to Spain, and it will teach Matia about the adult world in ways she could not foresee. This powerful, lyrical coming-of-age novel depicts Mallorca as an enchanted island, a lost Eden and a Never Land combined, where ancient hatreds and present-day passions collide. 'brilliant, devastating . . . every character is remarkable and captivating' The Times Literary Supplement 'a feverish, dramatic brew . . . the style is intoxicating . . . it offers a unique view of a part of Spain usually overlooked by literature' The Irish Times

A Spanish writer's approach by the intimist route to the still unassuaged griefs of the Civil War...What happens is that the protected bourgeois world in which it is possible to go on with the pretext of childishness at fourteen is split open by the realities of war, or, rather, the realities of which the war is the expression.

Uniquely precocious within the Hispanic fiction -published when author Ana Maria Matute was 22 years old- -Los Abel- reached the finals of the 1947 Nadal prize. It was positively received, due both to the prestige of the prize and the surprise created by the rising of this feminine youthful voice that continued the disruption created by Carmen Laforet's -Nada-. However the canonical critique proved unable to fully appreciate the originality of this novel that, baffling censors, trespassed the Spanish dictatorship moral order for women and set the Spanish novel within the trend of universal fiction. The struggle between good and evil, so vivid during and after the Spanish civil war, constitutes a recurring subject in Matute's novels. Child of the triumphant side, Matute never celebrated victory. Far from that, her civil war literature deals mainly with the pain of brotherly fight: a central issue in -Los Abel-. This issue is intertwined with Valba's -the main caracter- development, transforming the novel into a feminine -bildungsroman- of the forties, similar the the celebrated -Nada-, both maintaining intertextualites with gothic novels of famous women British writers of the XXth Century. But -Los Abel- includes a surprise amidst the repressive 1948 Spain, and it is that Valba, facing the bourgeois -sensibility- explicitly opposes her desires. Her unconscious as a -desiring machine- stands up, a factor that has baffled a vast number of well established critics. In this edition, prepared by prof. Victor Fuentes, both the introductory essay and the footnotes highlight these unusual characteristics, thus rescuing this work for the general public and, very specially, for courses both at under and graduate levels.