Seven Rooms brings together highlights from Hotel, a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction & poetry which, since its inception in 2016, provided a space for experimental reflection on literature's status as art & cultural mediator. Co-published by Tenement Press and Prototype, this anthology captures, refracts, and reflects a vital moment in independent publishing in the UK, and is built on the shared values of openness, collaboration, and total creative freedom.

A dazzling follow-up to Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal. ‘We would love to discover that each species has a biological clock in its cells, because, if that clock existed and if we were able to find it, perhaps we could stop it and thus become eternal,’ Arsuaga tells Millás in this book, in which science is intertwined with literature. The paleontologist reveals essential aspects of our existence to the writer, who discovers that old age is a country in which he still feels like a foreigner. After the extraordinary international reception of Life as Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal, the most brilliant double act in Spanish literature once again dazzle the reader by addressing topics such as death and eternity, longevity, disease, ageing, natural selection, programmed death, and survival. Here you will find humour, biology, nature, life, a lot of life … and two fascinating characters, the Sapiens and the Neanderthal, who surprise us on every page with their sharp reflections on how evolution has treated us as a species. And also as individuals.

A landmark in contemporary Spanish literature, Agustín Fernández Mallo's Nocilla Trilogy – made up of the novels Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience and Nocilla Lab – is a project for our time. Reading takes the form of literary channel surfing: we flick through an audacious network of chopped-up stories, recycled texts and mixed-media collages, and try to find the signal in the noise, reflecting the dizzying search for meaning that characterizes life in our digital age.  The globe-spanning narratives that explode across the trilogy take us from a lone poplar tree in the Nevada desert to a barnacle-covered cliff in Galicia, Spain, through scientific treatises and film-editing manuals, personal journals and comic strips. The books are full of references to indie cinema, theoretical physics, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel. And yet, for all the freewheeling, fragmentary swagger, a startling order emerges and takes hold. Peerless in its daring, Nocilla Trilogy charts a hidden and exhilarating cartography of contemporary experience. 

Maria and her granddaughter Alicia have never met. Decades apart, both make the same journey to Madrid in search of work and independence. Maria, scraping together a living as a cleaner and carer, sending money back home for the daughter she hardly knows; Alicia, raised in prosperity until a family tragedy, now trapped in a poorly paid job and a cycle of banal infidelities. Their lives are marked by precarity, and by the haunting sense of how things might have been different. Through a series of arresting vignettes, Elena Medel weaves together a broken family's story, stretching from the last years of Franco's dictatorship to mass feminist protests in contemporary Madrid. Audacious, intimate and shot through with razor-edged lyricism, The Wonders is a revelatory novel about the many ways that lives are shaped by class, history and feminism: about what has changed for working class women, and what has remained stubbornly the same.

This exciting collection celebrates the richness and variety of the Spanish short story, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Featuring over fifty stories selected by revered translator Margaret Jull Costa, it blends old favourites and hidden gems - many of which have never before been translated into English - and introduces readers to surprising new voices as well as giants of Spanish literary culture, from Emilia Pardo Bazan and Leopoldo Alas, through Merce Rodoreda and Manuel Rivas, to Ana Maria Matute and Javier Marias. Brimming with romance, horror, history, farce, strangeness and beauty, and showcasing alluring hairdressers, war defectors, vampiric mothers, and talismanic mandrake roots, the daring and entertaining assortment of tales in The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories will be a treasure trove for readers.

This hand-picked selection from The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories celebrates the best literature to emerge from Spain since the twentieth century. From a poignant personal betrayal to a darkly humorous exchange between two wedding guests, this sparkling collection provides unique cultural insight and literary inspiration for language learners. Includes works from beloved authors such as Javier Marías, Carmen Laforet and more.

Wherever there is life, there are lies. Slick-suited politicians lie on the podium, ready to tell voters what they want to hear. Cheating lovers, swindling businessmen, double-crossing villains - all liars. But nature lies too - the cheetah crouching in the tall grass waiting to pounce, its spots and straw-coloured fur blending in with its surroundings, the chameleon with its adaptable skin, the octopus hiding in its cave. Juan Jacinto Munoz-Rengel uncovers the slippery history of lies, some dark and elusive, others thunderous and dazzling. From primeval forests to modern politics, he explores the uncomfortable truths of our white lies, fudged facts and blatant deceptions. For centuries, philosophers, writers and poets have grappled with the paradox of what's fact and what's fiction. So who can we really believe? Our friends? Our partners? Our leaders? Can we even trust ourselves? Truly, this is the only book in which the abundance of lies on its pages is a sign of success. Or maybe it isn't. Who can really tell?

In The Things We've Seen, his most ambitious and accomplished novel to date, Agustin Fernandez Mallo captures the strangeness and interconnectedness of human existence in the twenty-first century. A writer travels to the small uninhabited island of San Simon, used as a Franquist concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War, and witnesses events which impel him on a wild goose chase across several continents. In Miami, an ageing Kurt Montana, the fourth astronaut who secretly accompanied Neil Armstrong and co. to the moon, revisits the important chapters in his life, from serving in the Vietnam War to his memory of seeing earth from space. In Normandy, a woman embarks on a walking tour of the D-Day beaches with the goal of re-enacting, step by step, another trip taken years before. Described as the novel David Lynch and W. G. Sebald might have written had they joined forces to explore the B-side of reality, The Things We've Seen is a mind-bending novel for our disjointed times.

A landmark in contemporary Spanish literature, Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy – Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, and Nocilla Lab – presents multiple narratives of people and places that reflect the world in the digital age. In this third, standalone volume, we find the author bedridden in Thailand after being knocked down by a motorbike, an accident which fortuitously gave him the time and space to begin writing the trilogy. Seven years later, when he travels with his girlfriend to Sardinia, they come across an old penitentiary that has been converted into an agritourism site. In a tour de force reminiscent of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, a story of suspense and exploration unfolds in the uninhabited hotel. From autofiction to horror story to graphic novel, Nocilla Lab is a fitting conclusion to one of the most daring literary experiments of the twenty-first century.

A New Scientist Book of the Year Prehistory is all around us. We just need to know where to look. Juan Jose Millas has always felt like he doesn't quite fit into human society. Sometimes he wonders if he is even a Homo sapiens at all. Perhaps he is a Neanderthal who somehow survived? So he turns to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the world's leading palaeontologists and a super-smart sapiens, to explain why we are the way we are and where we come from. Over the course of many months the two visit different places, many of them common scenes of our daily lives, and others unique archaeological sites. Arsuaga tries to teach the Neanderthal how to think like a sapiens and, above all, that prehistory is not a thing of the past: that traces of humanity through the millennia can be found anywhere, from a cave or a landscape to a children's playground or a toy shop. Millas and Arsuaga invite you on a journey of wonder that unites scientific discovery with the greatest human invention of all: the art of storytelling.

A literary triumph by one of Mexico's most promising young authors, Red Ants is the first ever literary translation into English from the Sierra Zapotec. This vibrant collection of short stories by Pergentino Jose updates magical realism for the 21st century. Red Ants paints a candid picture of indigenous Mexican life -- an essential counterpoint to cultural products of the colonial gaze. Jose's fantastical stories tackle themes of family, love, and independence in his signature style: unapologetically personal, coolly emotional, and always surprising.

An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short "history" of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of "portable literature." The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book, its members include writers and artists like Marcel Duchamp, Aleister Crowley, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico Garcia Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O'Keefe. The Shandies meet secretly in apartments, hotels, and cafes all over Europe to discuss what great literature really is: brief, not too serious, penetrating the depths of the mysterious. We witness the Shandies having adventures in stationary submarines, underground caverns, African backwaters, and the cultural capitals of Europe.

'An epic of noble proportions' Spectator A thrilling journey in search of the legendary malambo dance of Argentina, and one Gaucho who faces the biggest contest of his life Every year, at the height of summer, the remote Argentinian village of Laborde holds the prestigious national malambo contest. Little known outside the Argentinian pampas, the malambo is a centuries-old gaucho dance, governed by the most rigid rules and shatteringly physically demanding. It is the object of obsession for thousands of young working-class men, who sacrifice their spare time, their bodies and what little money they have to try to win the title of Malambo Champion. The twist is that a Malambo Champion may never compete again. In 2011, Leila Guerriero travelled to Laborde for what was supposed to be a brief investigation into this intriguing contest. But on the second night, one dancer's towering performance takes her breath away - he doesn't win, but Guerriero, irresistibly drawn, spends the next year following him in his preparations for the 2012 festival. In this remarkable work of reportage Guerriero proves herself to be as sharp-eyed as Gay Talese, as lyrical as Norman Mailer.

'A poet's novel, delicate but strong' Hilary Mantel Maria and her granddaughter Alicia have never met. Decades apart, both make the same journey to Madrid in search of work and independence. Maria, scraping together a living as a cleaner and carer, sending money back home for the daughter she hardly knows; Alicia, raised in prosperity until her family tragedy, now trapped in a poorly paid job and a cycle of banal infidelities. Their lives are marked by precarity, and by the haunting sense of how things might have been different. Through a series of arresting vignettes, Elena Medel weaves together a broken family's story, stretching from the last years of Franco's dictatorship to mass feminist protests in contemporary Madrid. Audacious, intimate and shot through with razor-edged lyricism, The Wonders is a revelatory novel about the many ways that lives are shaped by class, history and feminism: about what has changed for working class women, and what has remained stubbornly the same.

"Elegant" --"Marie Claire"

"Funny and revelatory." --"New York Times Book Review"

"Deeply accessible, deeply moving." --"Los Angeles Times"

"The Polish Boxer" covers a vast landscape of human experience while enfolding a search for origins: a grandson tries to make sense of his Polish grandfather's past and the story behind his numbered tattoo; a Serbian classical pianist longs for his forbidden heritage; a Mayan poet is torn between his studies and filial obligations; a striking young Israeli woman seeks answers in Central America; a university professor yearns for knowledge that he can't find in books and discovers something unexpected at a Mark Twain conference. Drawn to what lies beyond the range of reason, they all reach for the beautiful and fleeting, whether through humor, music, poetry, or unspoken words. Across his encounters with each of them, the narrator--a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon--pursues his most enigmatic subject: himself.

Mapping the geography of identity in a world scarred by a legacy of violence and exile, "The Polish Boxer "marks the debut of a major new Latin American voice in English.

Eduardo Halfon has been cited as among the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogota and is the recipient of Spain's prestigious Jose Maria de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue the story of "The Polish Boxer," which is his first novel to be published in English. He travels frequently to his native Guatemala and lives in Nebraska.

Frankenstein meets The Shadow of the Wind in a Gothic thriller set in the diabolical city of fin-de-siecle Barcelona. Daniel Amat has left Spain and all that happened there behind him. Having just achieved a brilliant role in Ancient Languages at Oxford University and an even more advantageous engagement, the arrival of a letter - a demand - stamped Barcelona comes like a cold hand from behind. He arrives back in that old, labyrinthine and near-mythic city a few days before the great 1888 World Fair, amid dread whispers of murders - the injuries reminiscent of an ancient curse, and bearing signs of the genius 16th century anatomist, Vesalius. Daniel is soon pulled into the depths of the crime, and eventually into the tunnels below Barcelona, where his own dark past and the future of science are joined in a terrible venture - to bring the secret of Vesalius to life. Gothic and gripping, this historical thriller makes of Barcelona a diabolical character - emerging out of the dark into a new electrical age, aflame with spirit, superstition and science. Published in eighteen countries, Jordi Llobregat's bestselling first novel mixes a passionate setting and cryptic mystery into a genre-crossing phenomenon.

Smuggling has been a way of life in Galicia for millennia. The Romans considered its windswept coast the edge of the world. To the Greeks it was from where Charon ferried souls to the Underworld. Since the Middle Ages, its shoreline has scuppered thousands of pirate ships. But the history of Cape Finisterre is no fiction and by the late twentieth century a new and exotic cargo flooded the cape's ports and fishing villages. In Snow on the Atlantic, the book the Spanish national court tried to ban, intrepid investigative journalist Nacho Carretero tells the incredible story of how a sleepy, unassuming corner of Spain became the cocaine gateway into Europe, exposing a new generation of criminals, cartels and corrupt officials, more efficient and ruthless than any who came before.

A #1 international bestseller reminiscent of the works of Roberto Bolano, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and Edward Rutherford--a page-turning historical epic, set in early eighteenth-century Spain, about a military mastermind whose betrayal ultimately leads to the conquest of Barcelona, from the globally popular Catalonian writer Albert Sanchez Pinol.

Why do the weak fight against the strong? At 98, Marti Zuviria ponders this question as he begins to tell the extraordinary tale of Catalonia and its annexation in 1714. No one knows the truth of the story better, for Marti was the very villain who betrayed the city he was commended to keep.

The story of Catalonia and Barcelona is also Marti's story. A prestigious military engineer in the early 1700s, he fought on both sides of the long War of the Spanish Succession between the Two Crowns--France and Spain--and aided an Allied enemy in resisting the consolidation of those two powers. Politically ambitious yet morally weak, Marti carefully navigates a sea of Machiavellian intrigue, eventually rising to a position of power that he will use for his own mercenary ends.

A sweeping tale of heroism, treason, war, love, pride, and regret that culminates in the tragic fall of a legendary city, illustrated with battle diagrams, portraits of political figures, and priceless maps of the old city of Barcelona, Victus is a magnificent literary achievement that is sure to be hailed as an instant classic.

"A brilliantly inventive writer" A.S. BYATT "The most important Basque writer of his generation" Times Literary Supplement "Not just a Basque novelist but the Basque novelist" Guardian Their lives run into each other, like water running over stones As the Basque mining town of Ugarte moves from the hazy summer of the 1972 Olympics, through the mining strikes of the turbulent Eighties and into the modern day, her people navigate the silences, secrets, joys and tragedies of their lives. From the story of a traumatised teenage boy at the town's bakery, to the tale of a group of comrades on an army base in the twilight of Franco's dictatorship, the interconnected narratives of Water Over Stones confront the changes time brings to Ugarte's close-knit community, as the lives of its inhabitants run into to each other like water running between stones. This extraordinary novel of friendship, nature, love and the immensity of death shows Bernardo Atxaga's mastery of his craft, and his ability to create places and characters that are impossible to forget. Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Margaret Jull-Costa

In this dazzling story of art and illusion, secrets and schemes, who is to be trusted - and what is real? From the internationally acclaimed author of Optic Nerve *A TLS Book of the Year* 'A writer who feels immediately important' Observer At a hotel in Buenos Aires, a woman checks in under a pseudonym. She wears a black fur shawl and has no luggage. She is alone. Over the coming days and nights, she tells a story, which begins with a secret shared in a local bath house, revealing art forgery and fraud on a dazzling scale. At its heart is an enigmatic genius who for years forged portraits of the city's elite, before disappearing without trace. It is a story of influence and intrigue, in which nothing is as it seems. We're not to expect 'names, numbers or dates', she cautions, but a more subtle kind of reckoning... Told in a mordant, irresistible voice and full of sharp surprises, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a captivating enquiry into what we mean by 'authenticity', in life as in art. At once poised and capricious, elegant and bold, it is a thrilling exploration of the relationships between what is lived, what is told, what is remembered, and what is real. Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead