At the Pontas Agency we are very glad to announce that the new novel by Basque author Kirmen Uribe, Elkarrekin esnatzeko ordua (The Hour of Waking Together), will be published simultaneously in Spanish (Seix Barral), Catalan (Edicions 62), Galician (Xerais) and in its original language, Basque, (Susa) in November 2016.
Karmele Urresti is in Ondarroa, her hometown, when the civil war starts. Almost everyone in town escapes and goes on exile, but she decides to stay to take care of the wounded and to free his father, who is in jail. It’s only when the war comes to an end that she leaves her hometown and goes to France, where she becomes involved with the Basque Cultural Embassy. It is there she meets her future husband, the musician Txomin Letamendi. Together they travel Europe, but when they know that Paris has fallen to the Germans, they flee to Venezuela.
In Venezuela History gets again in their lives. Txomin decides to join the Basque Secret Services (working under the American OSS) and so the family goes back to Europe, just in the middle of World War II. He spies the Nazis until he gets arrested in Barcelona, under a dictatorship he won’t survive. Karmele will have to risk everything and part, again and alone, with the blind hope of someone who leaves behind what one loves most.
The great novel of the Basque, Spanish and European history throughout the 20th Century until our present days.
Kirmen Uribe goes back to his roots and explores the history of the Basque country, his motherland, through the life of the Urresti family. With the neat and poetic prose that so much defines him, Kirmen Uribe pulls out a novel set to become a modern classic.
Kirmen Uribe (Ondarroa, 1970) is, according to the critics, one of the most relevant writers of his generation in Spain. Bilbao-New York-Bilbao earned him, at 39, the biggest and most prestigious literary distinction for a Spanish author, the National Prize of Literature, confirming him as one of the most interesting and original novelists in Basque and in Spain. The novel has been translated into over a dozen languages, including French (Gallimard), Japanese (Hakusui Sha) and English (Seren Books). It was selected by Foyles as one of the 15 books of the year in the UK in 2014. His second novel, Mussche (What Makes The World Go Around), written during a residency in Sausalito (CA), has been translated into Chinese and Japanese.
His works have been published at several American publications as The New Yorker, Open City, Circumference or Little Star. He has a column at El País Semanal. He writes in Euskera.
More information: Maria Cardona