Böcker av Fina Casalderrey

In this collection, Fina Casalderrey regales us with five stories written in the starry firmament of night. In the title story, a woman moves with her husband to a house in the village, where she plans to give birth, and is approached by a gardener who offers to tend the garden at night. In "Appointment in the Gardens of the South", a descendant of Galician emigrants to Argentina is drawn to a bronze statue whose face he cannot make out, which leads him to dig into his memory. In "Gusts of Mist", a woman walks the Northern Way to Santiago de Compostela in pursuit of happiness. In "Residence Zero", an artist moves to a new housing development in search of space, but finds it unsettling. In "An Ice Cream for Life", a man is shocked to discover that he has no heart. This book is reminiscent of another classic of Galician literature, When There's a Knock on the Door at Night, also available from Small Stations Press. Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's best-known writers of young people's literature. She is a winner of the Spanish National Book Award and Spain's candidate for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (the "Nobel Prize" for children's literature). Two of her novels have already appeared in English: Dove and Cut Throat and Just Imagine, Merche!

Auria is almost fifteen. In the summer of 1991, she bumps into the parish priest, Salvador, on a street of her home town. During the month of August, he is organizing a pilgrimage lasting twenty-two days to Częstochowa, a city in Poland, to celebrate World Youth Day. Auria is taken aback when he invites her to join the pilgrimage, but when her mother supports the idea, she decides to take a risk. Her mother, Luísa, works as a seamstress and is always telling Auria not to make the same mistakes she did, getting pregnant when she was only eighteen and having to raise a child on her own. There's no danger of that, thinks Auria. She has no interest whatsoever in men. But this new trip - which will take in such places as Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Venice - will bring her into close contact with Paio, Salvador's cousin once removed, and what was previously unthinkable may actually happen, she may actually experience all the intensity of first love. Auria shares all the events of that fateful summer with her diary, her new best friend, a diary she decides to call Merche. Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's best-known writers of young adult fiction and is the recipient of the Spanish National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Her novel Dove and Cut Throat, a charming story about a boy who gets bullied at school and who is torn between the two girls in his life - a classmate, Halima, and a girl he has met on the Internet, Dove - is also published in English by Small Stations Press.

André Santomé Lobeira is a teenager whose parents divorced when he was five. He puts on a front at school to defend himself against the bullies Raúl Pernas and Héctor Solla, who do everything they can to make his life miserable. He starts deliberately getting low marks in the hope they will ignore him. This encourages his grandfather to intervene, and André goes to live with his grandparents, who run a restaurant, The Birdhouse, in the garden of which his grandfather has an orphanage for birds. André finds a baby cut-throat finch, a finch with a red line across its neck, and keeps it as a pet. He is torn between two girls - Halima, a Moroccan girl in his class whose mother died as they were crossing into Spain, who helps him stand up to the bullies; and Dove, a girl he meets on the Internet, who helps him with his homework and when his grandfather falls ill. Dove arranges for them to meet in person, but André is afraid this will ruin their friendship and feels a strange sense of betrayal to the other girl in his life, Halima. He almost wishes Dove had never arranged their meeting... Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's foremost writers of young adult fiction, with over forty works to her name. She is the recipient of the Spanish National Prize for Literature and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Black Air" by Agustín Fernández Paz, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" by Elena Gallego Abad.