The Wonders

“Rhythmic, incantatory . . . Vivid and painfully intimate.” —The New York Times Book Review

Winner of the Francisco Umbral Prize for Best Book of the Year
A Finalist for the Finestres Award
Now Translated into Fifteen Languages

An international sensation, The Wonders follows María and Alicia through the streets of Madrid as they search for meaning and stability in a precarious world and unknowingly trace each other’s footfalls across time. María moved to the city in 1969, leaving her daughter with her family but hoping to save enough to take care of her. She worked as a housekeeper, then a caregiver, and later a cleaner, and somehow she was always taking care of someone else. Two generations later, in 2018, Alicia was working at the snack shop in Madrid’s Atocha train station when it overflowed with female protesters. She couldn’t have known that María was among them. Alicia didn’t have time for marches; she was just trying to hang on until the end of her shift.

Readers will fall in love with María and Alicia, whose stories finally converge in the chaos of the protests, the weight of the years of silence hanging thickly in the air between them. The Wonders brings half a century of the feminist movement to life, and launches an inimitable new voice in fiction. Medel’s lyrical sensibility reveals her roots as a poet, but her fast-paced and expansive storytelling show she’s a novelist ahead of her time.

Elena Medel is a Spanish poet and the founder and publisher of La Bella Varsovia, an independent poetry publishing house. Medel was the first woman ever to win the prestigious Francisco Umbral Prize, for her debut novel The Wonders, which was also longlisted for the Finestres Award and has been translated into fifteen languages. She published her prizewinning first collection of poetry, My First Bikini, when she was sixteen years old.
Lizzie Davis is a translator and an editor at Coffee House Press. She has translated Elena Medel’s poetry collection My First Bikini, Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize), and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Aura García-Junco. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, and other publications.