The Sleeping World
A Novel
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this “astonishing and haunting debut” (Publishers Weekly), a young woman searching for her lost brother is willing to risk everything amidst the riots, protests, and uprisings of post-Franco Spain.
Spain, 1977. Military rule is over. Bootleg punk music oozes out of illegal basement bars, uprisings spread across towns, fascists fight anarchists for political control, and students perform protest art in the city center, rioting against the old government, the undecided new order, against the universities, against themselves…
Mosca is an intelligent, disillusioned university student, whose younger brother is among the “disappeared,” taken by the police two years ago, now presumed dead. Spurred by the turmoil around them, Mosca and her friends commit an act that carries their rebellion too far and sends them spiraling out of their provincial hometown. But the further they go, the more Mosca believes her brother is alive and the more she is willing to do to find him.
The Sleeping World is a “searing, beautifully written” (Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban) and daring novel about youth, freedom, and our most visceral need: to keep our loved ones safe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her astonishing and haunting debut, Fuentes captures the violence and turmoil of post-Franco Spain in 1977, as seen through the eyes of Mosca, a college student whose world implodes when her beloved older brother, Alexis, disappears. Alexis is presumed dead after he was taken by police as he was seeking revenge for the their parents' murder. As Mosca and her friends, including her brother's closest confidant, Marco, eschew final exams for political demonstrations, their dangerous actions set them on a journey away from their small backwater town to Madrid and beyond. Mosca constantly searches for her brother, refusing to believe he is dead, and as she becomes more obsessed with guilt for not helping him before he disappeared, her life becomes desperate and detached a kind of sleepwalking, dreamlike state infused with an undertone of violence, in which the dead and the living seem to share the same space. All the while, Marco watches out for her, and she comes to learn he has his own guilt over her brother's plight. Remorse and the threat of violence are pervasive, but Marco helps Mosca understand that there is a way to find redemption and make up for the mistakes of the past.
