Translation Rights TQE / The Gray Cats

Three people will spend a summer solstice night in the city of Murcia that will be hard to forget. Jacinto, a Mexican bodyguard who works for Don Jorge, will have to settle an account with the killers of a protégé, while his boss celebrates a big party. His path will cross María’s, a fifteen year-old spending the night out with her friends, who is very willing to try new experiences to forget her family history. María does not suspect that her neighbor, Ginés, a mysterious and lonely fellow, is also out walking through the same roads and beaches where she has been that night, or that he has participated in Don Jorge’s party and knows Jacinto.

A direct tale, surprisingly effective and compulsive, about the secret lives of three characters that emerge in the middle of the night to wander through atmospheres and groups seldom portrayed so vividly in Spanish literature. A convergence of different lives in the process of eruption on a night full of risk and excess, when a love story unexpectedly begins.

The jury of the IX Tusquets Editores Prize for Novel has noted the narrative vigor of three forceful stories that cross paths on a summer night. The novel is told with credibility and growing vertigo and talks about the eagerness of a young woman to grow out of adolescence and far from the model of her mother, all in the midst of gangs and the settling of accounts, of parties and bets taken to the limit. In the words of Almudena Grandes, a member of the jury, during the book presentation, Ginés Sánchez is “a most valuable author consolidated with a moving novel that manages to approach the margins of danger and the cutting edge of death.”

Ginés Sánchez (Murcia, Spain, 1967) has a degree in Law and was a practicing lawyer for over ten years until 2001 when he decided to leave everything behind and travel around the world. He lived in Ireland for several years, as well as in Sicily, Cuba, Mexico and Costa Rica, doing different types of work. Lobisón (Werewolf, 2012), his first novel, was selected as “new talent” 2012 by FNAC bookshops.