The alcaravea (caraway) is a wild plant with small flowers. Its seeds have different uses that could replicate the stories in this book.

Medicinal: as an infusion this spice calms children’s colic (many are the children who cry here, despite the lullabies), but, in addition, it serves to clean and heal wounds, whether those of mothers defeated by life, those of a vizier in love or those of a shy stepbrother.

Culinary: a bittersweet taste spices most of the stories. In them, there is desolation and even horror at times, but also the light of a tenderness that heals.

Relaxing: its aroma, used in oils and lotions, has a calming quality that the characters in these stories will be grateful for.

In Alcaravea Irene Reyes-Noguerol takes the deepest care in the musicality and the precision of every phrase, handling with empathy the darkness in the broken characters, showing the way to redemption.

 

“Irene Reyes-Noguerol has been able to grant these creatures an intimate, heroic, divine epic. I don’t know what literary life is, but I do know what living literature consists of. Irene also knows it, because she is already one more member of the club together with Homero, Cernuda, Borges.” Fernando Iwasaki

SELECTED BY GRANTA AS ONE OF THE BEST SPANISH LANGUAGE WRITERS UNDER 35 – April 2021

 

160 pages – Original language: Spanish/World (Páginas de Espuma, 2024)