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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
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Biography, Literature & Literary studies

LA PENÍNSULA DE LAS CASAS VACÍA

David Uclés

A sort of Iberian "Macondo", a book that proposes a journey through the whole peninsula, getting to know its different peoples and cultural voices, and which serves as a historical map and a mirror for the contemporary reader.

This novel tells the story of a family during the Civil War; of an Andalusian imagined village, Jándula, and of a bleeding Iberia. A story where the real and the imaginary, the epic and the everyday intermingle to form a rich and delirious, yet vivid and credible tapestry. Covering an eventful period of history - Second Republic, Civil War and exile -, it stands out for its narrative style, from the surreal to the magical, and always in a coherent, documented, emotive and, most importantly, respectful way. La península de las casas vacías is an ode to the rural world, in that sense it has elements in common with Irene Solà and her novel Canto jo i la muntanya balla, as nature, the countryside, the telluric 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 short stories have received various awards. He won the first prize in the International Short Story Prize, «Cristina Tomi» in 2021 with La filosofa en el café y el pintor en el prostíbulo and won the second prize in the Pedro Zarco Prize in 2020 with his story Bicardio Reis. He has written for various magazines such as Actúa, Quo and Esquire. As an author, he has published novels such as Emilio y Octubre (Dos Bigotes, 2020) his first foray into magic realism, and El Llanto del León (Ediciones Complutense) for which he received the Complutense Literature Prize in 2019. In 2022, he received the Montserrat Roig scholarship, and has recently received the Leonardo scholarship of the BBCA Foundation. In 2024 he publishes La península de las casas vacías (Siruela, 2024).

Available products
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

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