Translation Rights TQE / A State of Unrest

Ricardo Marco, the manager of a department store, has a good standard of living, but he feels that he has renounced too many things to achieve it. This feeling of unrest becomes bigger when the company communicates his early retirement, and his wife insists on buying a luxury home outside of the city for which she will do the interior designing. One day, Ricardo visits a flea market that sets up every week in front of his office and meets a beautiful and mysterious young woman who manages one of the stands. After that day, Ricardo will go back again and again to find out more things about the people who surround the woman without realizing that he may just find an unexpected refuge and a lifesaver in that world and among those bizarre characters.

Un estado del malestar establishes Joaquín Berges as one of the most original and refreshing comical narrators in recent Spanish literature. He is a wonderful creator of characters and situations, a masterful narrator of hilarious and moving stories. In this novel, Berges demonstrates his control of humorous recourses in the midst of a delicious story of redemption and love.

Joaquín Berges was born in Zaragoza in 1965. He has a degree in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Zaragoza. He started his career as a writer with El club de los estrellados (The Club of the Starred), a surprising first novel whose agility and freshness revealed a wonderful storyteller. It was awarded the prize for the Best Debut Novel written in Spanish in 2009 at the Festival du Premier Roman in Chambéry (France). His following novels, Vive como puedas (Live as You Can, 2011) – selected by FNAC bookshops as “new talent” and a tribute to the genre of classic screwball comedies brought to the present day – and Un estado del malestar (A State of Unrest, 2012), demonstrated his talent for comic novels.