'A poet's novel, delicate but strong' Hilary Mantel María and her granddaughter Alicia have never met. Decades apart, both make the same journey to Madrid in search of work and independence. María, scraping together a living as a cleaner and carer, sending money back home for the daughter she hardly knows; Alicia, raised in prosperity until her family tragedy, now trapped in a poorly paid job and a cycle of banal infidelities. Their lives are marked by precarity, and by the haunting sense of how things might have been different. Through a series of arresting vignettes, Elena Medel weaves together a broken family's story, stretching from the last years of Franco's dictatorship to mass feminist protests in contemporary Madrid. Audacious, intimate and shot through with razor-edged lyricism, The Wonders is a revelatory novel about the many ways that lives are shaped by class, history and feminism: about what has changed for working class women, and what has remained stubbornly the same.

"Full of brilliant moments of illumination... The effect of [the book's] fragmentation is to make of these individual women's lives a collective picture of working-class Spanish womanhood. With light touches Medel conveys gradual but tremendous change... it has a boldly ingenious structure and flashes of beauty" - The Guardian

"A vivid and painfully intimate account of two easily overlooked lives. Medel paints a gray world of drudgery and solitude, yet she also makes room for her characters to grow into their power as women, a power they discover does not in fact lie in money" - New York Times

"A beautifully written novel that examines the lives of three generations of working-class women living precariously in Madrid" - Stylist

"Medel vividly evokes working-class city life as a monotonous merry-go-round of metro stations and dead-end jobs... each vignette is compelling and well observed" - Times Literary Supplement

"The diminution of choices which poverty forces on people is superbly well explored in The Wonders by Elena Medel, translated by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead" - The Irish Times

"An ambitious and enlightening book from an acclaimed Spanish poet" - The Irish Times

"Arresting characterizations and vivid prose fuel Medel's searing look at the impact gender, class, and financial hardships have on working-class Spanish women's lives as the country is buffeted by wider cultural shifts. It adds up to a powerful story" - Publishers Weekly

"Medel's debut novel examines the lives of three generations of women in Madrid with an unsparing eye" - Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"At just over 200 pages, The Wonders is a novel that doesn't waste a single word, instead basking in all the linguistic pleasures of great poetry" - Sunday Business Post

"Narration and style go hand in hand in a literary wonder that is absolutely personal yet reminds you of the audacity of Virginia Woolf... one of Spain's best poets has become one of its most important novelists" - El País

"Without falling into clichés, with a style that exudes lyricism, Medel narrates what recent Spanish history has meant for women... a narrative wonder" - ABC Cultural

"Spanish poet Medel's remarkable English-language debut moves from Francoist Spain into the present day, tracing a family's fractured ties over three generations... Arresting characterizations and vivid prose fuel Medel's searing look at the impact gender, class, and financial hardships have on working-class Spanish women's lives as the country is buffeted by wider cultural shifts. It adds up to a powerful story" - Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Reminiscent of Annie Ernaux, Elena Ferrante, and Deborah Levy... A thing of beauty... [an] extraordinary composition" - Irish Examiner

"This slim novel, by one of Spain's foremost contemporary poets, covers a vast amount of ground" - Meath Chronicle

"A skillful, shattering first novel of great finesse, rare intelligence and profound maturity" - Le Monde

"In the wake of Annie Ernaux and Virginia Woolf, Elena Medel weaves together the intimate and the political from a rarely read point of view. A powerful new feminist voice" - L'Humanité

"Medel's sensitive debut, charged with feminist insights but never losing sight of the particularities of its characters, astutely examines the forces-political, economic, familial, and personal-that have shaped the two women's richly detailed lives." - Booklist, starred review

"Throughout this captivating novel, Medel's poetic voice shines" - Ms Magazine

"At its core, The Wonders is a novel about family and memory. Elena Medel displays a fundamental understanding of people that makes it easy to care deeply about these characters and their stories. This is not a book anyone should miss" - Litro

"Vividly brings to life the stories of two working women... with this audacious and expansive novel, [Medel has] declared herself a writer to watch" - Book Riot