The Voices of Adriana - Signed Edition

A thrilling metafiction about grief, the internet, and the difficulty of knowing others, The Voices of Adriana combines the psychological acuity of Marguerite Duras with the creative possibility of One Thousand and One Nights.

Adriana has become obsessed with her father’s online dating. Recently widowed, he’s on a self-destructive, manic search for a partner to accompany him through his twilight years. At the same time, her life as an isolated grad student feels unreal, and to fill the void of her mother’s death, Adriana begins writing, trying on different voices. She builds worlds from the online profiles of her father’s latest flings, that is until more fundamental voices — those of her grandmother and mother — begin calling out to her in the night. The Voices of Adriana, the latest from Spanish writer Elvira Navarro, is an innovative novel about grief and how we might reanimate the voices of those we’ve lost, not as ghosts, but as living parts of ourselves.

“A relentless novel about the loss of lightness, about what to do with — or how to measure — the weight that remains. Brutally honest yet mysteriously elusive, with scalpel-like precision and poetic sharpness, Elvira Navarro explores the dialectic of care, its vulnerabilities and its legacies.” Andrés Neuman, author of Traveler of the Century

“The Voices of Adriana is an extraordinary novel, in which a woman speaks to us from her ancestral tempest and from her memories. Loneliness and family, the search for love, and a resurfacing past all intertwine in this extraordinary story that oscillates between social criticism and an exploration of the primitive forces of existence. Elvira Navarro is one of the greatest Spanish writers of today. A precise and meticulous surgeon of the heart’s most hidden emotions.” Manuel Vilas, author of Ordesa

“This book is a music box from which voices and permeations emerge to tell us who we are. Heartbreak and grief let loose an entanglement of narrative threads and chattering family ghosts. Black humor and tragedy literary sleight of hand, technology and memory. A distillation of narrative intelligence in which Elvira Navarro shows us that the truth is concealed within the most sophisticated artifacts. Behind, above, in the background, a woman who writes with a phenomenal capacity for insight, sensitivity and wisdom.” Marta Sanz, author of Susana y los viejos

Elvira Navarro won the Community of Madrid’s Young Writers Award in 2004. Her first book, La ciudad en invierno (The City in Winter), published in 2007, was well received by the critics, and her second, La ciudad feliz (The Happy City, Hispabooks, 2013) was given the twenty-fifth Jaén Fiction Award and the fourth Tormenta Award for best new author, as well as being selected as one of the books of the year by Culturas, the arts and culture supplement of the Spanish newspaper Público. Granta magazine also named her one of their top twenty-two Spanish writers under the age of thirty-five. She is the author of A Working Woman (2017, Two Lines Press) and Rabbit Island (2021, Two Lines Press), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Christina MacSweeney has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. Her work has been recognized in a number of important awards. Her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize and also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (2017). Her most recent translations include fiction and nonfiction works by Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published translations, articles and interviews on a variety of platforms.