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If your Spanish is already at the right level (just below A-level standard is enough), then the world's your oyster as far as reading is concerned. As well as Spanish-language novels in the original, you can have fun re-reading all your favourites that you first thumbed through in English – yes, it's the same story, same characters, and literary translators are as faithful as they can be to the author's style and voice, but something always feels a little different about it; perhaps you automatically find yourself setting the scene in your head in a country which speaks the language you're reading in. And you can look out for word-plays and jokes that have not translated because they probably can't be – Las suelas son el alma de los pies ('The souls of your feet'), from Olivia Goldsmith's Bad Boy (Chico Malo Busca Chica, in Spanish), or tarta de pastor and crujidos (shepherd's pie and crackers) in Rosamunde Pilcher's The Shell-Seekers (Los Buscadores de Conchas, in Spanish).
Those who have never attempted to read in another language besides their own are recommended to start with something they would whizz through in a day in their mother tongue, ideally translated from their native language, something they find easy, light and hard to put down, and even something they have read before, albeit long enough ago to have forgotten the finer details. You need to learn to enjoy reading in another language before you try to 'educate' yourself with what you think you 'should be' reading; don't put yourself off when you've hardly started! Don Quijote de la Mancha can wait! (And we promise it's worth it).
If you're not confident enough with the language to tackle a novel – or even a play, which can be a good introduction to reading in Spanish – plenty of bestsellers from Spain, from airport books to serious literature, Mediaeval to 21st century, are available in the English translation, and Amazon Spain is still delivering – national deliveries can cost as little as €1 for carriage and reach you within a day or two. So, use the 'lockdown' wisely, to hone your mind and relax. It'll be over soon enough and we can all get on with our lives.
Matilde Asensi
Pre-dating the Da Vinci Code and, in fact, Dan Brown's even earlier novels, this wizard wordsmith from Alicante is just as meaty, well-researched, and readable. Her covers and dust-jacket info may frighten the lazy reader (that's most of us, at least some of the time) into believing these are highbrow historical novels; well, they certainly appeal to those who like that sort of thing, but if all you're looking for is mental relaxation on the sofa these next few weeks, Asensi's works are guaranteed page-turners. Checkmate in Amber ('El Salón de Ámbar', in the original) is short and fast-moving: Focusing on a bunch of antique dealers peddling stolen works of art – a criminal gang whose members represent the pieces on a chess board – the central character, Ana Galdeano, is tasked with finding a unique artefact stolen by the Nazis in summer 1945. It's an entire room, made from Baltic amber, which has been dismantled, and in seeking it, Ana has to unravel a dangerous conspiracy dating back over 50 years (it's set in the 1990s). There's romance in it, too.
The Last Cato ('El Último Catón') is probably one of Asensi's most famous novels to date – a doorstopper, but doesn't feel like it, and has gone on to become a series after the author bowed to pressure from fans (she hadn't intended to carry on the lives of the Egyptian historian Farag Boswell or trendy young nun Ottavia, but decided to appease her readers eventually). Ottavia is a crack palaeographer who works in the bowels of the Vatican archives and is charged with decoding a strange tattoo of seven Greek letters and seven crosses found on an Ethiopian man's corpse, which was left next to three pieces of wood believed to be from the actual cross Jesus was crucified on. She stumbles across a secret brotherhood seeking the last pieces of the cross for themselves, and she and Farag embark on a hazardous journey across the lands mentioned in the Bible in an attempt to get to the bottom of the tangled web of Church history. Sound familiar? It came out in 2001, almost at the same time as the Da Vinci Code in 2000, but the ideas are close.
Also unputdownable is The Lost Origin ('El Origen Perdido'), in which a team of top computer hackers go searching the Amazon for a long-defunct ancient civilisation after the main character, Arnau, suspects his brother's death was caused by mental breakdown through a curse placed on him in his studies of lost tribes of Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, in old Aymara (a language still spoken in the Andean countries). Everything Under the Sky ('Todo Bajo el Cielo') is based in the 1920s and tells of Spanish artist Elvira whose estranged husband Rémy has died in Shanghai in mysterious circumstances. She sets off from Marseille (she lives in Paris) by boat to recover his body and his worldly goods, and finds herself embroiled in a tortuous quest for the First Emperor's treasure, which leads her into a sub-culture of opium dens, political conspiracy and gangsters.
Asensi has also written novels set in earlier centuries – the knight's tale Iacobus, the young Catalina travelling to the recently-discovered 'New World' who, after a shipwreck, becomes Martin Silver-Eye the resourceful pirate and adopted 'son' of a wealthy sea-trader, in Terra Firme, and the follow-ups to all these. Definitely worth delving into these next few weeks.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Initially refusing to have his works translated into anything other than French, Pérez-Reverte (Cartagena, Murcia, 1951) finally caved in, which was much appreciated by the Anglo-Saxon and Turkish worlds.
He is most famous for his Capitán Alatriste ('Captain Alatriste') series, which started in 1986 and featured the swashbuckling adventures of the complex central character during what was known as the Siglo de Oro, or 'Golden Age', in Spain, namely the 'long' 17th century.
Later works include the 21st-century epic The Queen of the South, about a Mexican woman who becomes leader of a drug cartel from her native country, but in southern Spain – fast-paced, intriguing and no-holds-barred.
Elvira Lindo
Best-known in Spain for her amusing column series in El País newspaper about her mishap-filled family holidays in the country – which were published as Tinto de Verano, in three volumes – Elvira's other humorous claim to literary fame is the anti-hero we can probably all identify with: Manolito Gafotas, or in the English version, Manolito Four-Eyes, the singularly uncool 10-year-old who was equally hilariously recognisable in the flesh as a TV series. His mum says, “Don't try to be different,” but Manolito cannot help it – he doesn't have to try to be different. He's either pouring out his complete, unabridged life story to the school counsellor, fighting over Susana the 'One-and-Only', figuring out the real meaning of World Peace, or attempting to avoid yet another punch-up with Ozzy the school bully.
Adult books she has written are much darker and include A Word from You ('Una Palabra Tuya'), about two street-sweeping women touched by tragedy; Something More Unexpected Than Death ('Algo Más Inesperado Que la Muerte'), about a woman married to a writer 30 years her senior and the dog-eat-dog world of fame, ego and celebrities; and The Other Neighbourhood ('El Otro Barrio', which in Spanish is a colloquial reference to 'the other side', 'death' or 'heaven'), about a 15-year-old boy charged with murder but who has the task of convincing the judge – and everyone else - of his innocence, despite all the evidence against him.
Pablo Tusset
If you loved Hitchhiker Douglas Adams, imagine he'd written about a Nick Hornby character, then throw in some scatological humour, and you've got this genius comic writer from Barcelona.
We just hope for your sake that, soon, some brave translator decides to embark on Sakamura, Corrales y los Muertos Rientes (Sakamura, Corrales and the Laughing Dead), so you can read it in English before it goes out of fashion. Starring the (fictional) regional and national presidents and royalty, it opens with the lehendakari, or Basque Country government head, shouting for his wife to come and cut his toenails because he's too fat to reach them himself. We then discover a series of beach tourists of several nationalities who have been found smiling, but dead; the only one not smiling is a guy from Latin America. It turns out there's a national conspiracy to force foreigners to learn catalán; it makes them so happy, because they feel as though they're permanently in the sunny region of Catalunya, that they literally die smiling; the Latin American chap doesn't, because life is much happier in his country so learning catalán subdues him. Highly topical in 2009 when it was published, its 'current' affairs satire is still very relevant today.
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
A key figure in the so-called 'Generation of '98' artists and writers, much of Blasco Ibáñez's work is set in and around the Albufera wetland south of Valencia (do add a trip here to your bucket list once we're able to leave our homes again), although some of them have become famous far beyond these massive, rice-growing salt marshes. One of these is Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis, or The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, published in 1916 and centring on the French and German husbands of an Argentinian landowner's daughters, who are forced onto opposite sides when they fight in World War I. Given that 'Great War' literature – original, or modern novels based in the period – has been very much in fashion for the past five or six years, it's a great one to add to your collection and file alongside Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks, Erich Maria Remarque et al on your bookshelf. It became a film in 1921, starring the legendary Rudolf Valentino, and again in 1962, although that time, set in World War II.
Other Blasco Ibáñez books turned into films in English include The Torrent, based on the 1900 book Entre Naranjos (literally, 'Among Orange Groves') and The Temptress, a reworking of the 1922 La Tierra de Todos (literally, 'Everybody's Land'), both starring Greta Garbo.
Novels that have been translated into English include the Mediterranean spy story Mare Nostrum (Our Sea), Blood and Sand (originally Sangre y Arena), about a matador in a love triangle, and A Woman Triumphant (originally La Maja Desnuda, or 'The Naked Lass', also the title of a Goya painting), about a humble blacksmith's son who becomes a talented artist, following his life and love affairs in Rome, Paris and Madrid – slightly along the lines of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, except more scandalous.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Murder, thwarted love and madness in the dusty, delicious world of an antique book shop in the Tibidabo area of Barcelona (now mostly a theme park) is the backdrop of Ruiz Zafón's La Sombra del Viento ('The Shadow of the Wind'), which came out in 2001 but really caused public furore around 2007, when anyone who was anybody owned a copy and some even used the title as their email address or social media username.
It's 1945, and the Catalunya capital is still trying to piece itself back together six years after the Civil War, and book trader's son Daniel is grappling with the recent death of his mother. He seeks emotional refuge in a fascinating book of the same title as the novel itself, written by a Julián Carax, and decides to look for other stuff penned by this gripping author. Except every last copy of every Carax novel, except the one in Daniel's hand, have been destroyed one by one – and Daniel gets caught up in the dark mystery of who is behind this literary wipe-out.
Carmen Laforet
On the A-level Spanish syllabus, but available in English since 2007, Nada, or Nothing, describes post-Civil War Spain from the point of view of a very young woman – literally. The central character is Andrea, 18, a student at Barcelona University, and the author is 23, having penned this short novel in a matter of months as an entry for the Nadal Literature Prize, which she won. Andrea moves from her native Canary Islands to stay with her grandmother whilst she is at university, and although the sweet, unassuming elderly lady does not feature heavily in the storyline, the short tempers, infidelity, violence, poverty, domestic disharmony and general family dysfunction of the other relatives living there – uncles Román and Juan, the latter's wife Glòria, maiden aunt Angustias (which translates as 'Anguish' and reflects her nature, too), and Antonia the maid – are told by the bewildered new arrival from a fly-on-the-wall perspective. The turbulence even eats into her college life, when she finds her best friend Ena's family is tangled up in her own, and although the panorama is as bleak, ravished and desolate indoors as the rest of the country is in the wartime aftermath, reflected in the novel's title, the ending for Andrea and Ena is full of promise and a bright future – one which was actually quite rare for even young women of the time, but one which reflects Laforet's own path in life.
Spanish, but not Spanish
Cheating a bit, you could also indulge in some Spanish-language bestsellers and household names that resonate with any Spaniard, but which are not, actually, Spanish. You've almost certainly heard of Gabriel García Márquez's Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad) and Love in the Time of Cholera (Amor en Tiempos de Cólera), and of the Colombian Nobel Prizewinner's ex-best friend and fellow Nobel Prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa – if only because now the Peruvian former left-wing presidential candidate is married to Philippine-Spanish 'it-girl' and model Isabel Preysler, ex-wife of Julio Iglesias and mother of Enrique Iglesias; and of Chilean president's daughter Isabel Allende. As for the latter, The House of Spirits (La Casa de los Espíritus) actually is worth the hype – the four generations of women with green hair, special powers and names based upon shades of white provide some quirky moments, the dashing young miner, tyrannical landowner and soft-hearted granddad are all the same person but in different chapters and generations, and the way great-granddaughter Alba brings it all to a cheerful, resilient and optimistic conclusion in the worst of circumstances after her illegitimate half-uncle uses her as an outlet for revenge somehow leaves you with a feel-good sensation. If you've been to, or one day want to go to, California and are intrigued about the Gold Rush days and how San Francisco was founded, Daughter of Fortune (La Hija de la Fortuna) is a raw, feminist account of how all that glitters is not, necessarily, this precious metal, and tells it how it really is from the mixed points of view of a Chinese doctor in love with the foundling Chilean daughter of a wealthy British brother and sister masquerading as husband and wife, who disguises herself as a boy on her gold-fossicking adventures which have just one aim: To find the young man she was engaged to in Santiago, but who may or may not have become one of the USA's most violent criminals.
Vargas Llosa's earlier novels, Conversations in the Cathedral (Conversaciones en la Catedral), about political debates in a pub called 'The Cathedral', and La Fiesta del Chivo, or The Feast of the Goat, about the despotic reign of Dominican Republican dictator Trujillo and his unhealthy thirst for women, were among the numerous epics that launched one of Spain's and Perú's greatest octogenarian celebrities to fame, but his later ones have leant more towards airport reads: The Way To Paradise (Paraíso en la Otra Esquina) tells the parallel tales of French artist Paul Gaugin, his turbulent relationship with Vincent Van Gogh and his exile to and womanising in Tahiti and French Polynesia, and the grandmother he never met, Flora Tristán, one of the founders of modern feminism – the out-of-wedlock daughter of a French woman and a Peruvian tycoon who escapes her sexless, unhappy marriage to fight for women's and workers' rights in Perú. And The Bad Girl (Travesuras de la Niña Mala) covers the on-off relationship between a Peruvian expat and the girl he first fell in love with as a teenager in the Miraflores district of Lima, and who keeps him dangling for decades.
García Márquez's two most famous novels come in at just under 500 pages, but if you're new to the late author's works and aren't ready to commit to these housebrick-sized tomes, you could start with one of his shorter stories – such as Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada), a 156-page detective novel, journalistic in style and based upon a true story, of the brothers of a jilted wife who announce to the four winds that they intend to murder the man who took her virginity, and whose friend and witness to the crime narrates it to the reader 27 years later. Another short one (186 pages), is In Evil Hour (En la Mala Hora), about a fictitious Colombian town struggling to get through the aftermath of a thwarted coup when a number of lampoons appear on the scene every night revealing the sins and skeletons of each of the villagers – who all blame each other.
Books about Spain
Fiction or non-fiction, there's plenty for you to dive into that was written in English in the original. You've all heard of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (spoiler if you haven't: Sorry, it's not an early-20th-century Fifty Shades of Grey, the title is about the 'ties that bind' humans to humans and that are impossible to break, however destructive) but hardly anyone seems to have heard of his short, fairly light-hearted novel Catalina: Set in the time of the Inquisition, it gives you a very readable picture of late Mediaeval central Spain (the location isn't clear, but it seems to be somewhere between Segovia and Soria in Castilla y León), and focuses on a lame 16-year-old girl in love with a young man who cannot marry her, however much he loves her, because she would be a burden, and who, during the Feast of the Assumption (which is August 15, a public holiday in Spain) is miraculously cured of her limp, discards her crutches and runs down the church steps. An investigation into who performed the miracle, a convent which tries to poach her, an elopement that leads to Catalina's becoming a (very successful, in fact) travelling actress, and a loveable, hapless uncle make this an uplifting, highly-readable introduction to the British author who created Philip the club-footed unhappy schoolboy/German gap-year pupil/unsuccessful Parisian art student/medical student and naïve victim of the ruthless, gold-digging Mildred in his far more famous work.
A fascinating insight into the British people involved in the Civil War, Max Arthur's The Real Band of Brothers features first-hand accounts by the last-surviving members of the International Brigades – mostly men, but also a woman, who worked as a nurse in the conflict zone. Ideal for those who are interested in the history of actual people in the war rather than just the fighting, body count and politics, these deeply personal testimonies are a great introduction to the period for those who have normally shied away from history books.
Even better, and especially if your idea of delving into the past is reading the delectably-scatological Horrible Histories series, you can read Bob Fowke's Spain: An Amazingly Short History, from his Travel Briefs range (other countries are in it, too, including France and Turkey), in the length of a flight to the UK. It gives you cartoons, abridged facts and quirky résumés (“The Iberians were civilised – after a fashion – although they later earned a reputation for being fierce warriors and for being extremely hairy,” or, “Getting waisted: At one of their annual festivals, Iberian women measured each other's waists with a belt of a standard size. Any woman found to be too large was mocked by the others. It's not known what this standard size was,”) and daft chapter headings ('The Second Republic: Reasons not to dance with dead nuns'; 'Bourbons: They abolished the Pyrénées', 'When Toledo Was Top: A land for louts', and even 'Basket Case: What Went Wrong' which, curiously, is about the 16th and 17th centuries, knights – or hidalgos – and starts with the promising sub-heading of 'They ate pot'). According to the dust jacket, Queen Isabella II 'danced like a hippopotamus', King Felipe V 'spent weeks in bed without changing his clothes', and the 10th-century hero and über-brave knight in armour, El Cid, 'wore his long beard in a net so that it couldn't be tweaked'.
So, there you have it: A few weeks of not going anywhere except the supermarket or the pharmacy needn't have you climbing the walls. In fact, unless you're a super-fast reader, you'll probably be hoping the shut-down lasts even longer so you can get through the whole of this list. At least, long enough until beach weather comes, when you can finish it off in the sun with the sound of the waves crashing and kiddies splashing.
Photographs: First picture from La Mente Es Maravillosa ('The Mind is Marvellous'), at Lamenteesmaravillosa.com; pictures two to five from Amazon and Goodreads
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