Along the Mediterranean coastline of Spain, real-estate developers scramble to transform the once pastoral landscape into tourist resorts, nightclubs, and beachfront properties with lavish bars and pools. The booming post-Franco years have left everything up for grabs. Cremation opens with the death of Matias, a paterfamilias who had rejected all of these changes and whose passing sets off a chain reaction, uncovering a past that had been buried for years, and leading those closest to him to question the paths they've chosen. In a rich mosaic narrative, filled with a hypnotic chorus of voices, Cremation explores the coked-up champagne fizz of luxurious parties shadowed by underworlds of political corruption, prostitution, and ruthless financial speculation. The novel enters that melancholy ouroboros of capitalist greed that led to the financial crash and captures something essential about our values, our choices, and our all too human mistakes. Like William Faulkner or Francis Bacon, Chirbes stares, clear-eyed, into the abyss, and portrays us as we really are.

With La buena letra Rafael Chirbes offers another first-person narrative, another person reaching the end of life looking back. The narrator of the novel, Ana, is a fairly simple woman, never particularly eager to tell of her life. Now she chooses to revisit it, telling her life story to her son in brief episodes.

The acclaimed novel of Spain's economic crisis - a timely masterpiece. Under a weak winter sun in small-town Spain, a man discovers a rotting corpse in a marsh. It's a despairing town filled with half-finished housing developments and unemployment, a place defeated by the burst of the economic bubble. Stuck in the same town is Esteban, his small factory bankrupt, his investments gone, the sole carer to his mute, invalid father. As Esteban's disappointment and fury lead him to form a dramatic plan to reverse financial ruin, other voices float up from the wreckage. Stories of loss twist together to form a kaleidoscopic image of Spain's crisis. And the corpse in the marsh is just one. Chirbes's rhythmic, torrential style creates a Spanish masterpiece for our age.