The City

An Unexpected Portrait of Madrid through Three Women

In a single apartment building in Madrid, the lives of three women intersect. On the fourth floor, Oliva's passionate relationship has given way to abuse, her lover seeming more and more like an animal, her apartment more and more like a cage. On the third, Damaris, who emigrated from Colombia after a devastating earthquake, spends each day working as the nanny to two privileged children while hoping her efforts will provide a better life for her own. And in the tiny, disused apartment on the ground floor, Horia, a Moroccan woman who first came to Spain as a seasonal agricultural laborer, works as the building's caretaker while searching for her missing son. Through the stories of these women, award-winning author Lara Moreno paints a vivid portrait of urban isolation and societal marginalization.

With unflinching, propulsive prose, The City plunges down the paths that led these women to and through a metropolitan landscape shaped by inequality and cultural division. With three closely-drawn character portraits and the pacing of a thriller, Moreno's novel offers a geographyof resilience and despair in a city marked by social and cultural division.

Lara Moreno was born in 1978 in Seville and lives in Madrid, where she works as an editor and teaches writing. She has published the collections of short fiction Casi todas las tijeras and Cuatro Veces Fuego, as well as several books of poetry, which have been collected, along with new and unpublished poems, in Tempestad en víspera de viernes. She was awarded the FNAC New Talent Award upon the publication of her first novel, Por si se va la luz (In Case We Lose Power, forthcoming from Open Letter books), which was followed by the critically acclaimed Wolfskin and The City.

Katie Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Her translations include novels by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durán, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, Katixa Agirre, Jon Bilbao, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Almudena Sánchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adón. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 for Lara Moreno's In Case We Lose Power, and has been a finalist for the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Prize and the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize, and shortlisted for the National Translation Award.

Alice Banks is a translator from Spanish and French based in Madrid with a MA in Literary translation from the University of East Anglia. Her other translations include Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir, Madrid Will Be Their Tomb by Elizabeth Duval, and Double Room by Anne Sénès. She also works as an Editorial Assistant for The European Literature Network, where she writes the monthly column, "La Española," and worked as Assistant Editor on The Spanish Riveter magazine, to which she contributed several translations and articles.