The Low Voices

In this brilliant coming-of-age novel, Rivas writes humorously and philosophically on identity, belonging, memory and the nature of storytelling itself.

The Low Voices is a novel about life, it is life itself telling stories, it is the memory of the quiet voices of the people I got to know.

The Low Voices draws on a patchwork of memories from Rivas's early life under Franco. There's Rivas's elder sister, Mária, who died young; his mother, the 'verbivore'; his father, a construction worker with vertigo who suffers two heart attacks without realising; and a supporting cast of local priests, chatty hairdressers, monstrous carnival effigies, wolf hunters, and a 'baritone cockerel'.

The book is full of personal stories such as his first fight, using suitcases for school chairs (a reminder of the grinding poverty that forced many to leave Galicia), and his burgeoning career in journalism, against a background of the unspoken dread of the Spanish Civil War at home, and the wider world as Coca-Cola sets up a factory nearby and news comes in of men landing on the moon.

MANUEL RIVAS was born in 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.