The Last Days of Terranova, Manuel Rivas
The Last Days of Terranova, Manuel Rivas
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Last Days of Terranova

Author: Manuel Rivas, Jacob Rogers

Narrator: Andre Bellido

Unabridged: 6 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/25/2023


Synopsis

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

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.

About Manuel Rivas

Manuel Rivas 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 fifteen, and has since published numerous anthologies of poetry, novels, collected essays, and news articles. His 1998 novel O lapis 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paula

Não queria ser um escravo dos livros. Queria-os para ler, mas o meu sonho não era propriamente ser livreiro. Achava curioso que aqueles homens e mulheres aproveitassem as suas viagens de ida e volta da emigração para trazerem livros no fundo falso da mala. (...) Admirava-os a eles, não aos livros. O......more

Goodreads review by Dax

I found this one to be a lot of fun to read. Rivas' sentences and characters are playful, giving the novel a joyful tone despite some somber episodes. The lower average rating probably stems from a lack of a true plot, as Rivas is really more interested in showing the evolution of Spain in the secon......more

Goodreads review by Kevin

A love letter to books, literature and bookstores. Beautiful prose.......more

Goodreads review by Kasa

Since I'm a sucker for stories with bookstores as background, I was drawn to this. Once again, archipelago books presents a treasure, a beautifully translated work heretofore unavailable in English. I learned recently that archipelago is not-for-profit, which makes me love them and their presentatio......more