Lone Man

Bernardo Atxaga, a Basque, was born in 1951. He has written plays, children's books, radio plays and novels, including Obabakoak, which has been published in fourteen languages including English, and won several prizes. His novel, The Lone Man, was described in The Times, by Peter Millar as 'a spellbinding, sympathetic odyssey into the mind of a former terrorist'.

Two Basque gunmen on the run after a bomb attack find refuge in a hotel whose owner, Carlos, used to belong to their movement. With the World Cup in progress, the Polish football team is staying in the hotel. A television crew is infiltrated by undercover agents.

Seven Houses in France

Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012 - a dark tale of human ambition by the European master A.S. Byatt called 'A brilliantly inventive writer'.

A dark comedy about the vanity of human desires which deftly balances compassion and cynicism

A brilliantly inventive writer...He understands the nature of storytelling and is at once terribly moving and wildly funny

Seven Houses in France is an enjoyable, somewhat frightening novel by one of Europe's best novelists... Atxaga is still the master of a complex story, told with deceptive simplicity

Atxaga’s grim and complicated story is lucidly told

Atxaga’s story is fresh and his treatment of violence psychologically rich

It takes a special kind of genius to transform this most unpromising of locations into a vehicle for black comedy, but that is precisely what the Basque author Bernardo Atxaga achieves in this mesmerizing novel

Bernardo Atxaga was born in Gipuzkoa in Spain in 1951 and lives in the Basque Country, writing in Basque and Spanish. He is a prizewinning novelist and poet, whose books, including Obabakoak and The Accordionist's Son, have won critical acclaim in Spain and abroad. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages. 
 
Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator from Spanish and Portugese for over twenty years, translating such writers as José Saramago, Eça de Queiroz, Luis Fernando Verissimo and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has brought her a number of prizes, the most recent of which was the 2010 Premio Valle-Inclán for Javier Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell.

1903, and Captain Lalande Biran, overseeing a garrison on the banks of the Congo, has an ambition: to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafés of Paris. 
 
His glamorous wife Christine has a further ambition: to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad. 
 
At the Captain’s side are an ex-legionnaire womaniser, and a servile, treacherous man who dreams of running a brothel. At their hands the jungle is transformed into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. But everything changes with the arrival of a new officer and brilliant marksman: the enigmatic Chrysostome Liège.

The Lone Woman

Bernardo Atxaga, a Basque, was born in 1951. He published his first work at the age of twenty in an anthology of Basque writers. He has written plays, children's books, radio scripts and novels, including Obabakoak, which has been published in fourteen languages including English, and won several prizes. His last novel, The Lone Man, was described by Peter Millar in The Times as "a spellbinding, sympathetic odyssey into the mind of a former terrorist". 
 
Margaret Jull Costa translated Obabakoak and The Lone Man. She is also translator of works by Javier Marías (including A Heart so White which won the Dublin International Impac Award), Carmen Martín Gaite and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Her translation of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet made her joint-winner of the Portuguese translation prize.

Irene is 37 years old and just out of prison after serving time for terrorist activities. Deciding to return home to Bilbao, she takes a bus journey across Spain, striking up conversations with the passengers who include two plainclothes policemen. As the journey progresses, so the tension builds.

The Accordionist's Son

A magnificent family epic, haunted by the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, by award-winning Basque author Bernardo Atxaga.

A briliantly inventive writer... terribly moving and wildly funny

This most delicate and personal of novels packs a powerful political message

Incredibly powerful... magnificently written

A magical novel that exlores friendship and memory, language and loss

In all his work, Atxaga delves into the impact of the political on individual lives. What is most moving in The Accordionist's Son is the push and counter-push of these pressures on a believable individual (and Margaret Jull Costa's elegant and unfussy translation gives us a clear view of him in English)

Bernardo Atxaga's books are performing an important service to his people and his language

Each character is a world, a story marvellously integrated into the whole...A master storyteller has become a fabulous chronicler of reality. If Obabakoak charmed us, The Accordionist's Son charms and moves us

This is a richly textured, beautifully-written glimpse into a world that makes its otherworldliness felt

Bernardo Atxaga was born in Gipuzkoa in Spain in 1951 and lives in the Basque Country, writing in Basque and Spanish. He is a prizewinning novelist and poet, whose books, including Obabakoak and Seven Houses in France, have won critical acclaim in Spain and abroad. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages. 
 
Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator from Spanish and Portugese for over twenty years, translating such writers as José Saramago, Eça de Queiroz, Luis Fernando Verissimo and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has brought her a number of prizes, the most recent of which was the 2010 Premio Valle-Inclán for Javier Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell.

The Accordionist's Son is a remarkably powerful and accomplished novel, exploring the life of David Imaz, a former inhabitant of the Basque village of Obaba, now living in exile and ill-health on a ranch in California. 
 
As a young man, David divides his time between his uncle's ranch and his life in the village, where he reluctantly practises the accordion on the insistence of his authoritarian father. Increasingly aware of the long shadow cast by the Spanish Civil War, he begins to unravel the story of the conflict, his father's association with the fascists and his uncle's opposition and brave decision to hide a wanted republican. 
 
Caught betweeen the two men, the course of his own life is changed forever when he agrees to shelter a group of students on the run from the military police. 
 
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

Obabakoak

A sprawling carnivalesque set in an eccentric village, this is a wildly unusual novel, originally written in Basque, from one of the most exciting talents in contemporary European literature.

A brilliantly inventive writer...He understands the nature of story telling and is at once terribly moving and wildly funny

Atxaga holds the attention by his sheer craft, by the complete control he exhibits

This English version beautifully retains Mr. Atxaga's magically flowing and seemingly simple style... an achievement not made easy by his considerable technical and linguistic virtuosity and his love of inventing ways to make language itself speak with new voices

Bernardo Atxaga was born in Gipuzkoa in Spain in 1951 and lives in the Basque Country, writing in Basque and Spanish. He is a prizewinning novelist and poet, whose books, including The Accordionist's Son and Seven Houses in France, have won critical acclaim in Spain and abroad. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages.

One of only a hundred or so books originally written in the Basque language during the last four centuries, Obabakoak is a shimmering, mercurial novel about life in Obaba, a remote, exotic, Basque village. 
 
Obaba is peopled with innocents and intellectuals, shepherds and schoolchildren, whilst everyone from a lovelorn schoolmistress to a cultured but self-hating dwarf wanders across the page. 
 
Obabakoak is a dazzling collage of stories, town gossip, diary excerpts and literary theory, all held together by Atxaga's distinctive and tenderly ironic voice.

Bernardo Atxaga

Margaret Jull Costa

An elegiac tale of lost innocence and the ruthlessness of the natural world, where the hunter all too soon becomes the prey. As he dies leaving his two boys orphans, Paulo's father lays on him the duty to look after his retarded but overgrown younger brother, for otherwise Daniel will be put away in an institution. But Daniel never listens to his brother, who is unable to exert any authority over him. Instead Daniel, aged twenty and still in the throes of puberty, goes off in an inept, fumbling pursuit of the village girls, as they ride past on their bicycles on the way to sewing lessons or cake-baking classes. Among these girls are pretty Teresa and her plain friend, Carmen, a girl disfigured by a birthmark on one cheek. Both of them are sweet on Paulo, the quiet, irresolute but handsome lad who works in the family sawmill, while Teresa is the reluctant, indeed disgusted, object of Daniel's dreams. Each girl schemes to cut the other out and win favour with Paulo. All ends in tears. And the narrators of this story, who take turns to continue the tale, are creatures of the wild, driven by their inner voices - a bird, squirrels, a black snake.

Bernardo Atxaga

Books by Bernardo Atxaga

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