The Last Days of Terranova

A far-reaching story of an outcast and his bookstore: a home to forbidden books, political dissidents, and cultural smugglers all brought to vivid poetic life

“Rivas is a master… His pages bloom like flowers, swerving in unpredictable arcs toward a light-source that is constantly moving.”  —Bookforum

The Last Days of Terranova tells of Vicenzo Fontana, the elderly owner of the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it's set to close due to the greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, Vincenzo spends the night in his beloved store filled with more than seventy years of fugitive histories.
 
Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novel ferries us back to Vicenzo's childhood, when his father opened the store in 1935, to the years that the store was run by his Uncle Eliseo, and to the years in the lead-up to the democratic transition, which Vicenzo spent as far away from the bookstore as possible, in Madrid.
 
Like the bookstore itself, The Last Days of Terranova is a space crammed with stories, histories, and literary references, and as many nooks, crannies, and complexities, brought to life in Rivas’s vital prose.

Manuel Rivas Barrós is an award-winning Galician writer, poet, screenwriter, and journalist, and considered a revolutionary in contemporary Galician literature. He began his writing career at the age of 15, and has since published nine anthologies of poetry, fourteen novels, collected essays, and news articles. His 1998 novel O lápis do carpinteiro (The Carpenter's Pencil) is the most widely translated work in the history of Galician literature, and was also adapted to film. Rivas has received the Spanish Critics' Prize, the Galician Critics' Prize, the National Literature Prize for Narrative, the Spanish Critics' Prize, and the National Critics’ Prize in Galician for Os libros arden mal, which was also named Book of the Year by booksellers in Madrid. Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician prose and poetry. His translation of Carlos Casares’s novel, His Excellency, came out from Small Stations Press in 2017.