All Is Silence

Manuel Rivas delivers a literary masterpiece about three young friends growing up in a community which is bound by a conspiracy of silence

One of the finest tours de force published anywhere, in any language

In  this haunting, wonderfully poetic novel, Rivas gives us eloquent  warning that what starts as fearful silence may end up as an incapacity  to speak

Rivas,  ably translated here by Jonathan Dunne, combines a lyric gift, full of  rich imagery and a touch of fantasy, with bald, direct prose

Rivas magically immerses us in the labyrinth of saudade, illuminating paths that show us the way to paradise lost.

With his latest novel, we regain the pleasure of reading once more.

Manuel Rivas is the best writer in Spain today. All Is Silence is a thoughtful, penetrating and haunting book whose poetic resonance lingers long after you turn the final page.

Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruña in 1957. He writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known in Spain for his journalism, as well as for his prize-winning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter's Pencil and Books Burn Badly. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Manuel Rivas delivers a literary masterpiece about three young friends growing up in a community which is bound by a conspiracy of silence 
 
 
Fins and Brinco are best friends, and they both adore the wild and beautiful Leda. The three young friends spend their days exploring the dunes and picking through the treasures that the sea washes on to the shores of Galicia. One day, as they are playing in the abandoned school on the edge of the village, they come across treasure of another kind: a huge cache of whisky hidden under a sheet. But before they can exploit their discovery a shot rings out, and a man wearing an impeccable white suit and panama hat enters the room. That day they learn the most important lesson of all, that the mouth is for keeping quiet.

Butterfly's Tongue

Manuel Rivas was born in Coruña in 1957. He writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He worked as a journalist before turning to writing and his novels and short stories have won some of Spain's most prestigious literary awards. 
 
Margaret Jull Costa has translated many Spanish and Portugese-language writers. Her translation of José Saramago's All the Names won the 2000 Weidenfeld Prize. 
 
Jonathan Dunne's translations from the Galician include the poetry of Rosalía de Castro and the short stories of Rafael Dieste and Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao.

In the summer of 1936, before the outbreak of the Civil War that plunged Spain into three tears of agony and terror, eight-year-old Moncho is beginning his first day at school. Butterfly's Tongue is about a friendship between the boy and his schoolmaster, born of their shared interest in animal and insect life. In Saxophone in the Mist a young musician discovers the meaning of music and of love in the face of a girl he meets on a foggy night at a fair; while in Carmina the boy listens as an old man relates how a village dog named Tarzan used to frustrate him in his attempts to woo his beloved.

In The Wilderness

An early novel by the author of The Carpenter's Pencil that displays Manuel Rivas's powers as a storyteller and his poetic vision to their fullest.

Manuel Rivas was born in A Coru-a in 1957. He writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known in Spain for his journalism and television programmes, as well as for his prize-winning novels and short stories.

A glorious cast of animals and birds, as well as humans, relate the magical stories that form the plot of Manuel Rivas's extraordinary novel. An old lady, Misia, tells how the 300 ravens of Xallas are the warrior-poets of the last King of Galicia. A priest, Don Xil, explains to a peasant girl, Rosa, that the beautifully carved women in the local church are not saints, but represent the seven deadly sins. A mouse, Matac-ns, a poacher in his previous life, is chased by a cat, the bagpiper and anarchist, Arturo of Lousame. A bat, Gaspar, relates his own death to a lizard. In a nearby cellar, half the parish are found to have transmigrated into spiders, snails, toads-Manuel Rivas's story emerges like spirals of smoke, in a series of memorably poetic images. His characters have their roots deep in the traditions, legends and history of his beloved Galicia. Few contemporary storytellers share his power of vision and sense of cultural identity, or can narrate their tales with such tenderness and humour.

Books Burn Badly

A masterpiece by one of Europe's greatest living writers - a brilliant evocation of the Spanish Civil War

It's time for reviewers and sundry pundits to quit the flattering comparisons with Lorca, Joyce and Garcia Marquez. Manuel Rivas reads like no-one else on the planet...one of those novels to lavish on friends... Manuel Rivas' sweeping novel, translated into English for the first time, is an undoubted classic

This is an exceptional book by an exceptional writer... a unique literary enterprise

A novelistic tour-de-force...hauntingly poetic use of language and light touch...Rivas never loses faith in the human ability to overcome the bleakest of situations

His boldest take yet on the war's repercussions in his native Galicia... a work of unusual beauty

The author reinvigorates the power of the word, the heritage of stories which pass from generation to generation.

Manuel Rivas writes with lyrical depth about the burning and pillaging of books whose existences are intertwined with a story of suspense that condemns authoritarianism and extols freedom... A novel that could have been history or biography, but is instead a work of literature written by an author at the height of his powers.

Rivas weaves a tapestry of characters into an event that is largely overlooked in history

Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruña in 1957. He writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known in Spain for his journalism, as well as for his prize-winning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter's Pencil. His works have been translated into twenty languages.

On 19 August 1936 Hercules the boxer stands on the quayside at Coruña and watches Fascist soldiers piling up books and setting them alight. With this moment a young carefree group of friends are transformed into a broken generation. 
Out of this incident during the early months of Spain's tragic civil war, Manuel Rivas weaves a colourful tapestry of stories and unforgettable characters to create a panorama of twentieth-century Spanish history. For it is not only the lives of Hercules the boxer and his friends that are tainted by the unending conflict, but also those of a young washerwoman who sees souls in the clouded river water and the stammering son of a judge who uncovers his father's hidden library. 
 
As the singed pages fly away on the breeze, their stories live on in the minds of their readers.

And Other Stories

Vermeer's Milkmaid

He is an important storyteller because he is sensitive and has an incredible ear, which, in his fiction, is allied to great integrity - John Berger

Manuel Rivas was born in A Corua in 1957. He writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known in Spain for his journalism and television programmes, as well as for his prize-winning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter's Pencil. 
 
Jonathan Dunne is the translator of two of Manuel Rivas's novels, The Carpenter's Pencil and En salvaxe compa-a. His other translations from the Galician include the poetry of Rosal-a de Castro and the short stories of Rafael Dieste.

The theme of non-communication in human relationships in a world saturated with information is the connecting thread in this collection of stories. The mystery of light in Vermeer's famous painting inspires a writer; a travelling lingerie salesman is helped by a rock musician as he waits for his runaway son; an emigrant describes his experiences in Havana to his nephew; a thief, killed while robbing a bank, recounts his love story. 
 
Non-communication in a world saturated with information is the connecting theme in this lively collection of stories by the author of The Carpenter's Pencil. The everyday lives of Rivas's unforgettable characters may be desperate and harsh, filled with pain and solitude, but humour and tenderness always redeem them. Vermeer's Milkmaid includes the three stories that comprise Butterfly's Tongue, upon which Jos- Luis Cuerda's acclaimed film of the same title is based.

Carpenter's Pencil

'A beautiful novel, full of humanity and tenderness' Arturo Perez-Reverte

A startling novel. I have rarely read a piece of writing so poetic

He is an important storyteller because he is sensitive and he has an incredible ear, which, in his fiction, is allied to great ingenuity

I learnt more about the Spanish Civil War from The Carpenter's Pencil...than from any history book I've read

Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruña in 1957. He writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known in Spain for his journalism, as well as for his prize-winning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter's Pencil and Books Burn Badly. His most recent novel, All is Silence, will be published in English in 2013. His works have been translated into twenty languages.

It is the summer of 1936, the early months of the agonising civil war that engulfs Spain and shakes the rest of the world. In a prison in the pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela, an artist sketches the famous porch of the cathedral, the Portico da Gloria. He uses a carpenter's pencil. But instead of reproducing the sculptured faces of the prophets and elders, he draws the faces of his fellow Republican prisoners. 
 
Many years later in post-Franco Spain, a survivor of that period, Doctor Daniel da Barca, returns from exile to his native Galicia, and the threads of past memories begin to be woven together. This poetic and moving novel conveys the horror and savagery of the tragedy that divided Spain, and the experiences of the men and women who lived through it. Yet in the process, it also relates one of the most beautiful love stories imaginable.

Manuel Rivas

Jonathan Dunne

Beautiful... It resonates with memory, love and palpable grief... Rivas is special – funny, benign, opinionated. He tells wonderful stories because he learned early in life how to listen, and he listened to the soft, wise voices around him. Rivas misses nothing, and it is fascinating to see how, in The Low Voices, he does not tell us how he became a writer but shows us the people, such as his quiet, unassuming, determined mother, who helped make him one

One of Spain's best-known novelists... Rivas's imagery sparkles like dew in the morning sun

Rivas has an appealing lyrical style, an offbeat humour and a translator well attuned to both.

The nature of this book means it can be enjoyed as a single straight story or as individual chapters. It’s one to leave by the bedside, to dip into every now and then, and enjoy over and over. Something, I think, I’ll be doing a lot.

An affecting, impressionistic novel-cum-memoir. Like all great autobiographical writing, it pulls the magic trick of making the specific and personal universally appealing.

Rivas’ deepest, most confidential and intimate book to date.

Rivas reveals himself as an authentic storyteller, transforming reality into imagination without ever betraying it.

It is wonderful, a luminescent account of lives lived… For those of a more political bent – and setting aside that the book has been funded by the EU taxpayers! – reading it now is an interesting backdrop to the Catalonian bid for independence, with its pride in community diversity and awareness that bad things in the Spanish past linger long in family memories. But for others, just read it, enjoy the pictures created and admire the outstanding writing.

Manuel is growing up in Franco's Spain. He adores his elder sister, María, and they are watched over by their mother, who enjoys reciting poetry, and their father, a construction worker with vertigo. Beyond the walls of the house, he encounters chatty hairdressers and priests, wolf hunters and monstrous carnival effigies. 
 
The community is still haunted by the civil war, yet Manuel's world is changing. Coca-Cola opens a factory nearby and news arrives of men landing on the moon. This is a story about family, memory and the experiences that make us who we are.

Manuel Rivas

Praise for The Low Voices

Beautiful... It resonates with memory, love and palpable grief... Rivas is special – funny, benign, opinionated. He tells wonderful stories because he learned early in life how to listen, and he listened to t ...

One of Spain's best-known novelists... Rivas's imagery sparkles like dew in the morning sun

Rivas has an appealing lyrical style, an offbeat humour and a translator well attuned to both.

Beautiful... It resonates with memory, love and palpable grief... Rivas is special – funny, benign, opinionated. He tells wonderful stories because he learned early in life how to listen, and he listened to t ...

One of Spain's best-known novelists... Rivas's imagery sparkles like dew in the morning sun

Rivas has an appealing lyrical style, an offbeat humour and a translator well attuned to both.

Beautiful... It resonates with memory, love and palpable grief... Rivas is special – funny, benign, opinionated. He tells wonderful stories because he learned early in life how to listen, and he listened to t ...

One of Spain's best-known novelists... Rivas's imagery sparkles like dew in the morning sun

Rivas has an appealing lyrical style, an offbeat humour and a translator well attuned to both.

Books by Manuel Rivas

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