Translation Rights TQE / The Jaquemart

A year after the publication of Noticias del mundo real (News From the Real World), the astonishing fourth novel which welcomed Juan Miñana into our ranks, we believed it was time to give his many readers a treat and add his second novel to our catalogue. El jaquemart is not only one of the best historical novels ever written, but it also confirms the surprising sagacity of its young author and the fine quality of his prose.

El jaquemart (The Jaquemart) is an ambitious recreation of 17th century Barcelona in. An extraordinary exercise in style and narrative power, its protagonist is a clockmaker involved in an obstinate personal struggle with time.

The plague is laying waste to Barcelona during the last years of Felipe IV´s reign, when Buenaventura Deulocrega, master in arts and medicine, arrives at Santa Cruz Hospital determined to help fight the epidemic. There, he gets to know an enigmatic and sagacious character, Juan de Ameno, the king´s clockmaker. Ameno has asked for sanctuary in the private rooms of the hospital in order to be able to complete what will be his final project: the manufacturing of a bronze jaquemart or automaton which will form part of the clock on the cathedral. From this strange refuge, Buenaventura and Juan de Ameno face the onslaughts of these harsh times and forge a peculiar friendship bulwarked in a constant recreation of the past, which through fables as intricate and subtle as clockwork, appears to save them from the implacable passage of time.

Juan Miñana was born in Barcelona in 1959. He became known in literary circles through the publication of a book of poems in Catalan, Vespre de festa (Night Festivity) in 1979. His first novel, La claque (The Claque), a satire on a school for audience animators, made a reasonable impression on the critics, but his reputation as a novelist was not established until the publication of El jaquemart (The Jaquemart)in 1991. He also has a collection of short stories, Última sopa de rabo en la tertulia España (Last Tail Soup in the Spain Gathering), written in 1992, and in 1996 he published La playa de Pekin (The Beach of Pekin), his third novel, which received a unanimously warm welcome and which we wish to add to our catalogue soon.