ORCHESTA

Everything is in this verbena: sex, love, corruption, fear, childhood, the dead, magic and tradition. [...] Miqui Otero is one of the best storytellers of urban stories and, from this book, also of rural stories. He weaves it all together marvellously! [...] Read it because you won't stop singing.

This Catalan writer has truly taken a leap in space, time, and topic, and he has committed to crafting this musical structure that spans from the past to the present, but which melds all times, all ages, all stories, all songs, all conflicts, like at a village festival, because Orchestra, like the perfect song, contains everything that matters, has mattered, or will matter (.) Miqui Otero writes exquisitely about what we have lost, about our awareness of that loss, and what young people, our children, will also lose. But not yet. For now, they can still dance at the summer festival and maybe we can too, a little longer, until the final song plays.

So songs play, things happen, and the author wields the baton of this 'Orchestra' with renewed mastery to enthusiastically and elegantly lead this choral epic with the dedication of an Austro-Hungarian miniaturist.

Ojo Crítico Awarded author** **Dulce Chacón Award Shortlist

The perfectly tuned Orchestra begins as a technical prodigy soloist and ends up as a choral miracle of feeling. I don't think a novel can receive a higher praise.

A palpitating choral account of a summer festivity in a Galician village: [...] an outpouring of talent and empathy.

A summer festival is the perfect setting for this spellbinding story (.) Longstanding grudges, insurmountable traumas, and old loves. The series of statements from various characterssome of which are shot through with an irresistible tendernessdrives the story at this festival.

An absolutely masterful novel

An electric tale written with magic and precision.

A pulsating, choral portrait of a summer festival that brings together an array of very different characters who are bound by secrets, land, and music. An outpouring of talent and empathy. Laughs, tears, secrets, memories, and song, a crescendoing book akin to Boston's More Than a Feeling.

Unforgettable.

The magic of "Orquesta" is this dream of a night out in a Galician village. Otero achieves the most difficult thing yet: to dissolve himself into a dozen splendid protagonists who end up forming an astonishing collective and communal voice. A novel of novels in which the "we" speaks, the "I" listens and the characters take root around that writer who is not Miqui, but Miguel, the hinge that connects the ages that were and those that will be; the sentinel in the curve of life, in that fold that unites and at the same time separates the living from the dead, the countryside from the city, the ordinary from the supernatural. "Orchestra" is a phenomenal quantum leap. A choral and luminous portrait of a place that becomes a rapturous world of its own and yet also a common universe. It doesn't seem to be that easy to detach oneself from this colossal "Orchestra".

And, if we are going to talk about summer nights, none better than the one Miqui Otero has put together in Orquesta, a fabulous portrait of a summer night in a Galician village and an admirable choral feat in which music takes centre stage.

Miqui Otero has embarked on the task of telling the story of a summer night based on an unusual character, the music played by the orchestra during a concert in the village of Valdeplata. Otero's novel, which comes four years after the success of Simón, mixes the living and the dead, the young and the old, in a story that moves to the rhythm of the melodies played by the musicians.

Orchestra is a book that has it all. It makes you aware of just how special it is to be alive. Along with the living and the dead, along with ghosts and legends. You were born in a place with music, fire, beer, butterflies, brass bands, storytelling, enchantment, and surprises. The key, as children know well, is to keep the mystery in sight.

What the increasingly INCREDIBLE Miqui Otero does has achieved is indescribably beautiful. In this book, there is a majestic and mutating multiple 'I'as many voices as there are possible ages and possible worlds within our own closed off world, the one we belong tothat is born of necessity, of desire, of sharing, and which becomes a different sort of 'I,' a common 'I,' an 'I' that matters, that matters to you, that is you, and at the same time you are a character in this novelthe child riding around on his red bike, with his whole life ahead, all the world a runwayand its reader, someone who is, like the music, both within and without. Otero sublimates his enchanted vision of the world, a vision in which our actions not only could be beautiful, but have already been beautiful, and are still beautiful, here and now.

A literary prodigy who reminds you of the glory of being alive. It is possible to dance while you're reading and even while you're writing, as this wonderful novel by Miqui Otero proves. It's a story that gets you dancing, like Franco Battiato, at an endless summer festival.

Italian: Mondadori

The Barcelona-born author is a master at capturing the small details. There is no nostalgia in his gaze, but neither is there a fanatical enthusiasm for the present. It is empathetic and critical, sympathetic but not pious, curious but not blinded.

One of the best writers of his generation.

Otero sets out, resolves and fits each piece into a formidable, finely tuned narration. It demands to be read aloud [...], it's a permanent invocation of the living and the dead, with the springs of Pedro Páramo.