Translation Rights TQE / Manolita's Three Weddings

Surviving in postwar Madrid is a hard job, especially for Manolita, a young woman who must take care of her four younger siblings after her father and stepmother become imprisoned and her brother Antonio is forced to hide out in a flamenco club. To add to her problems, Manolita will have to do Antonio a favor: he has become desperate to put to use a set of duplicators that no one knows how to work in order to print clandestine political propaganda, and will ask Manolita to visit a prisoner who might be able to figure out how to get them to function. Manolita cannot possibly imagine that this shy and apparently unattractive young prisoner will end up becoming such an important part of her life and that their paths will cross again in a penitentiary detachment. But first, Manolita must discover the identity of the informer who is prowling around the neighborhood.  Las tres bodas de Manolita is a moving choral story about the years of poverty and grief of the immediate Spanish postwar period and an unforgettable fresco of real and imagined characters. A memorable novel about the web of solidarity woven by many people, from the dancers of a flamenco club to the women that wait on line at the prison doors to visit prisoners, in order to protect a courageous young woman for whom happiness will also become a form of resistance.

Almudena Grandes (Madrid, 1960)  became widely known as a writer in 1989 with her novel Las edades de Lulú, which won the XI Sonrisa Vertical Prize. She has received the acclaim of readers and critics ever since. She is the author of eleven novels and two books of short stories that have established her as one of the most solid and internationally-known narrators in contemporary Spanish literature. Many of her works have been taken to the big screen, and her novel, El corazón helado, one of the most acclaimed and long-lasting successes in current Spanish literature, has received, among other awards, the Fundación Lara Prize, the prizes of the booksellers in Madrid and Seville, the Rapallo Carige in  Italy and the Prix Méditerranée in France. Her novel Inés y la alegría was awarded the Critics Prize in Madrid in 2011, the Elena Poniatowska Prize 2011 and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize 2011, and El lector de Julio Verne was selected best book of 2012 by the readers of El País.