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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
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Biography, Literature & Literary studies

LA PENÍNSULA DE LAS CASAS VACÍAS

David Uclés

This novel about a family and an Andalusian village during Civil War stands out for its surreal, magical, and respectful narrative style.

From the small village of Jándula, a family of peasants - whose numbers dwindled from around forty members in 1936 to total disappearance just three years later - will scatter across Iberia, experiencing enduring firsthand the most significant and somber events of the most delicate and bloodstained chapter in Spanish history: the Civil War.

The book is an ode to the rural world, in the sense that nature, the countryside, history and the imaginary go hand in hand. The use of "magical neorealism" allows the author to play with time and space, highlighting the most powerful images of all those years and telling stories in a single family, through its different generations.

David Uclés (Úbeda, 1990) a translation and Interpreting graduate, is an author, musician, illustrator, and translator. He has worked as a Spanish, German, French and English teacher in various countries. His novel was a huge success in Spain in 2024, and nominated as "Best novel if the year" by the press.

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Book Published 2024-04-01 by Ediciones Siruela

Comments

A very good novel, brave and funny, witty and well written (...) David Uclés achieves the narrative feat of telling with humour some episodes of extreme violence and not crashing while doing it.

Uclés's honesty impresses, as does the conviction with which he tackles the challenge

Of the five novels I have selected, perhaps the most daring and the most brilliant is the monumental work La península de las casas vacías, by David Uclés, a story about the Civil War in a surrealist way with the use of a Cervantine narrator who interpellates the reader and the characters, a marvel that will shake everyone who reads it.

This is a heartbreaking book -like our own History- which is, at the same time, a family chronicle and a fresco of a war of which we are all heirs and which still today, unfortunately, separates us

The Peninsula of Empty Houses is a very good novel, brave and funny, witty and well written, orderly and Cervantine in terms of its own textual awareness, thanks to the active protagonism of a narrator who is not tacit but very present, all-powerful but not as omniscient as he would like, which leads to some good surprises.

Selected as one of the best novels of 2024.

Italian: Neri Pozza

If there is anyone who can record the pain and transform it into threads with which to weave a devastating tapestry, it is the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alekseyevich, whose The Boys in Zinc (2016) I would like to emphasise. [...] The book exemplifies a postmodern fracture that prioritises life over the necrophilia of the state, which no ideology justifies. Perhaps representative of this tendency, the split between the conflagration and the ideological corpus that should sustain it, is David Uclés' La península de las casas vacías (2024), a praiseworthy novel in its ambitions, telling the story of the civil war from a magical realist perspective, which produces a twist in the Spanish cultural industry in regards to that slaughter. In it, the young author distances himself from the characters and cannot avoid meddling as a narrator. This original approach unravels a generational problem: we cannot swallow any militaristic references, it overcomes us, even in the choice of a literary position.

With an unforeseen prose, as original as it is uncomplicated, David Uclés is a real breath of fresh air in Spanish literatureWith an unforeseen prose, as original as it is uncomplicated, David Uclés is a real breath of fresh air in Spanish literature