Obabakoak Stories from a Village

"A brilliantly inventive writer ... he understands the nature of storytelling and is at once terribly moving and wildy funny." --A.S. Byatt Obabakoakis a shimmering, mercurial collection about life in Obaba, a remote, exotic Basque village. A schoolboy's miningengineer father tricks him into growing up, an unfortunate environmentalist rescues deceptively harmless lizards, and a rescue mission on a Swiss mountain-climbing expedition in Nepal turns into murder. Obaba is peopled with innocents and intellectuals, shepherds and schoolchildren, while everyone from a lovelorn schoolmistress to a cultured but self-hating dwarf wanders across the page. Hints of darker undercurrents mingle with moments of wry humor in this dazzling collage of stories, town gossip, diary excerpts, and literary theory, all held together by Bernardo Atxaga's distinctive and tenderly ironic voice. An unforgettable work from an international literary giant, whomThe Observer(London) listed among the top twenty-one writers of the twenty-first century.

Bernardo Atxaga was born in Gipuzkoa, Spain, in 1951 and lives in the Basque Country, writing in Basque and Spanish. He is a prizewinning novelist and poet whose books include The Accordionist’s Son, The Lone Man, and The Lone Woman.

“Atxaga holds the attention by his sheer craft, by the complete control he exhibits.” —The Independent