Manuel Vilas

Winner of the 2019 Prix Femina Étranger – Best Book of the Year (Babelia) – Recommended by La Esfera – Artes & Letras Literature Prize – Altoaragonés Book of the Year 2018

Written at times from heartbreak and always from emotion, Ordesa is an intimate chronicle of Spain over the past decades—but it is also a story about everything that reminds us of our fragility, about the need to rise up and keep going when nothing seems possible, when almost all the bonds that once tied us to others have vanished or been broken. And yet, we survive.

“Ordesa is the castaway’s letter we had been waiting for years to receive. It arrived in bookstores riding a wave of foam, which, when it receded, left it there on the shore. [...] It was enough to read the first page to realize that this cry for help came from the deepest part of ourselves. It called out to us because, in some way, beyond its protagonists, we too were its authors. [...] It described, with new words arranged in an unusual way, what we had been—and what we tried to save ourselves from. Through a prose that moved back and forth in a hypnotic rhythm, it alternated fierceness with compassion, yes with no, now with then. In short, after reading that first page, we took it home with us.” Juan José Millás, Babelia

“A powerful, sincere, at times raw book about the loss of one’s parents, about the pain of words left unsaid, and about the need to love and be loved. Excellently written. I’m not surprised at all by its success." Fernando Aramburu

“It takes great precision to tell these things; it takes acid, a sharp knife, the exact pin that bursts the balloon of vanity. What remains in the end is the pure emotion of truth and the grief for all that has been lost.” Antonio Muñoz Molina

“One of the most human, profound, and comforting books I have read in a long time.” Lorenzo Silva

“A beautiful and haunting book, composed in equal parts of guilt, rage, and love.” Ignacio Martínez de Pisón

“A unique, brilliant, and fearless writer—utterly his own, and unafraid to take risks.” Sara Mesa

“No one should fail to read Ordesa, by Manuel Vilas. It is the book of 2018—and that’s saying something, for there have been and will be great books. Love as medicine. Poverty as disease. Literature as elixir.” Luisgé Martín

“This book is magnificent, brave and heartbreaking.” Javier Cercas

“One of my favourite reads this year.” Annie Ernaux

“Ordesa is irresistible. With breathtaking impulse, he proves his calling of saying very concrete, lucid and irrefutable things. Or maybe this book is only an invitation to dance until the end of love. Popular and extremely risky at the same time, Manuel Vilas has written something unforgettable.” Nadal Suau, El Cultural

“Supremely written. Vilas will go on to write other books, but for me he will always be the author of Ordesa.” José María Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC Cultural

“A book written with clarity and powerfulness. A normal life, in a middle-lower class family, during a time when Spain was almost normal. With normal language. With all the anomaly of authenticity. Without forgetting that life is sacred and that only poetry finds the right words.” Antonio Lucas, El Mundo

“A book full of compassion towards the underdogs of History, the everyday men. An extraordinary book.” Carlos Pardo, Babelia 

“The novel hums with magnetic and lively scenes. This is an indelible portrait of a man facing the costs of a life dedicated to remembrance.” Publishers Weekly

“Vilas conveys many moments of pain and happiness any reader might recognize as the narrator plunges into the maelstrom of closely examined memory. A dark and challenging but emotionally rich work.” Kirkus Reviews 

“Manuel Vilas writes both novels and poetry, and this book falls somewhere in between. It’s a meditation on yearning, solitude and self; a soul storm, a mirage of phantom figures—resurrected images of dead ancestors, childhood memories, the changing face of Spain itself. And all of these visions come in waves to Manuel after his parents’ deaths, as he struggles to make sense of his own midlife sorrow and emptiness. It’s a book of deep reckoning—of the meaningful and mundane but written with an airy, even whimsical touch […] Despite the melancholy at its heart, this is ultimately a book of light.” The New York Times Book Review

“Poignant and sensitive portrait of a wounded man… A journey both nostalgic and melancholic.” Library Journal, Starred Review