Translation Rights TQE / The Russian dancer from Montecarlo

By the author of the acclaimed Thine is the kingdom, Best Foreign Book Award in France in 2000

Constantino Augusto de Moreas has received an invitation to visit a Spanish university, after having spent his entire life in Cuba dedicating himself to the scholarly investigation of the life of the poet José Martí. But without giving it much thought, he decides to skip the congress and continues the ride to Barcelona. He is very interested in seeing how people live in his idolized Europe, but he also obeys a desire to breathe some sense into his faint life, to recover old dreams, old loves that have been cast aside by time and modesty. He settles into a cheap boarding house and slowly begins to discover that reality is tougher than he had ever imagined. A ghostly image goes through his mind time and again: the image of an old workmate from the sugar harvest in Cuba, a classical dancer that promised to make it into the Russian Ballet of Montecarlo. With irony, tenderness and growing emotion, it shows in five movements perhaps the final opportunity the main character gives himself.

Praise for the previous novel:

“Equipped with surprising narrative wisdom and with a great simplicity of means, Estévez closes a very personal vision of the city. Estévez is the creator of a personal temporary universe where argument, digression, and pure narrative that resembles spoken word, live together comfortably. This is the perfect formula so that the reader wishes to never have to put down the book.” El Periódico

“Estévez is a wonderful storyteller who narrates a complex puzzle in which each piece and character fits into place and comes alive.” El Mundo

“A paradigm of compositional precision. The novel has the same exuberant narrative planes as his first novel, since Estévez writes with exquisite literary tact. The characters seem to be part of human truth, and when they are literary, they seem to be literary truth. El navegante dormido is also a painful account of the disappearance of a way of life and a way of understanding in pre-Revolutionary Cuba.” El País

Abilio Estévez was born in Havana in 1954 and currently lives in Barcelona. He has a degree in Hispanic Literature and Languages and also studied Philosophy in his native city. He has written two magnificent critically-acclaimed novels, Tuyo es el reino (Thine Is the Kingdom) -winner of the Cuban Critics Prize in 1999 and of the Best Foreign Book Award in France in 2000- and Los palacios distantes (The Distant Palaces) selected by the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia as the Book of the Year in 2004. Both novels have been translated into more than ten languages. He is also the author of a book of short stories, El horizonte y otros regresos (The Horizon and Other Ways Back) –Luis Cernuda Prize in 1986–, of the poetic prose Manual de tentaciones (Temptation Manual) –Cuban Critics Prize in 1987–, and of different plays, such as the monologues Ceremonias para actores desesperados (Ceremonies for Desperate Actors).