QUÍMICA PARA MOSQUITOS

In this book, which won the 54th Barbastro City International Novel Prize, Aleksandra Lun uses an astonishing intimist style to examine recent history - and the scars it left on the nuclear family and society writ large - to tell a story brimming with mystery, suspense, uncertainty, and potential, a story about freedom and how fleeting our time here really is.

In the summer of 1977, a child is born in a mining town in a country under Soviet control. In the apartment block where she lives with her family - all of whom work at the State-owned chemical plant - she closely watches the strange routines of a planned economy. Sometimes they are taken by tram to the outskirts of town, where they work on a plot of land assigned by the government, digging some sort of shelter for protection from a constant, diffuse threat that the girl is able to perceive. Once per year, a train takes her away from the ugliness of the city to a village farm. There, nature beats out the rhythm of the days, animals work, people fight for survival, and insects tell tales of the past. Life shuttles between the city and the country as the girl intuits that there is somewhere else, some other place she remembers only faintly, intermittently. One day, she discovers that she isn't the only person who remembers this place: someone else in her apartment block has been there too. This novel's originality stems from a literary tradition that dives, through the seeming simplicity of a deceptively childlike voice, into the great themes of our time. In this book, which won the 54th Barbastro City International Novel Prize, Aleksandra Lun uses an astonishing intimist style to examine recent history - and the scars it left on the nuclear family and society writ large - to tell a story brimming with mystery, suspense, uncertainty, and potential, a story about freedom and how fleeting our time here really is. Aleksandra Lun (Gliwice, 1979) left her native Poland at the age of 19 to study Spanish Philology in Spain, working in a casino, and now lives in Brussels. His first book Los palimpsestos (Minúscula, 2015) was translated into English, French and Dutch, and received the prestigious PEN/Heim grant from PEN America. His second novel Química para mosquitos (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2024) has been awarded the LIV Premio Internacional de Novela Ciudad de Barbastro.