Translation Rights TQE / Green Valleys, Red Hills

An ambitious fresco about the recent history of the País Vasco.  A saga and a portrait of a magic and yet realistic microcosm that is the town of Getxo.  Verdes valles, colinas rojas (Green Valleys, Red Hills) is the great novel about the collision between a changing world and a town that resists all change.  The story begins at the end of the XIX Century with the confrontation between Cristina Oiaindia, an aristocrat married to the rich industrialist Camilo Baskardo, and Her, an ambitious and astute servant without a name that single-handedly endangers all traditional values when she announces that she is expecting an illegitimate child. 

That story of that rivalry, prolonged for decades and which marked the history of Getxo, is told by two protagonists:  Mr. Manuel, an old teacher, and Asier Altube, his favorite disciple.  They recall the meanders and ramifications of many other stories derived from these, such as that of Roque Altobe, the first-born, in love with a socialist agitator, or that of the Baskardo boys, who had to  live through their mother’s madness. 

Ramiro Pinilla was born in Bilbao in 1923. He won the Nadal Prize in 1960 and the National Prize of the Critics in 1961 with the novel Las ciegas hormigas (The Blind Ants), and was a finalist to the Planeta Prize in 1971 with Seno (Breast).  For almost three decades he voluntarily distanced himself from the publishing industry. During that time, Pinilla published his own works, such as En el tiempo de los tallos verdes (In the Age of Green Stems, 1969), Recuerda, oh recuerda (Remember, Oh Remember, 1974), Primeras historias de la Guerra interminable (The First Stories of the Never-ending War, 1977), La gran guerra de Doña Toda (The Great War of Mrs. Toda, 1978), Andanzas de Txiqui Baskardo (The Adventures of Txiqui Baskardo, 1980), Quince años (Fifteen Years, 1990), and Huesos (Bones, 1997). Pinilla returned to the publishing circuit with Verdes valles, Colinas rojas (Green Vallies, Red Hills), a trilogy made up of the novels La tierra convulsa (The Earth Trembles), Los cuerpos desnudos (Naked Bodies), and Las cenizas del hierro (Iron Ashes) that won the Euskadi Prize 2005, the National Critics Prize, and the National Prize for Narrative in 2006. That same year, Pinilla published La higuera (The Fig Tree), a novel about the Civil War, humiliation, and forgiveness that is currently being translated into several languages.