The Last Days of Terranova
Spain

The Last Days of Terranova

by Manuel Rivas

Freedom & Resistance Historical Fiction Literary Fiction 2022

Summary

What if a bookstore could preserve everything the world is trying to forget? In 2014, Vicenzo Fontana faces the imminent closure of Terranova, his family’s beloved bookstore, threatened by property developers after decades of serving as a refuge for dissidents, exiles, and forbidden books. Spending one final night among its shelves, the elderly bookseller revisits the people and events that shaped his life and the history of the shop. His memories lead back to 1935, when his father first opened Terranova, and forward through the Spanish Civil War’s legacy, Franco’s dictatorship, and the turbulent years of political resistance. Among the bookstore’s visitors are idealists, rebels, writers, and people fleeing persecution, each carrying a story of their own. Blending literary allusions, political history, and poetic storytelling, Manuel Rivas creates a moving tribute to books as vessels of memory and instruments of resistance. As Terranova faces its final hours, the novel asks what we lose when the places that protect ideas and shelter outsiders disappear.

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About the author
Manuel Rivas
Manuel Rivas

Manuel Rivas (born in 1957 in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain) is a Galician writer, poet, journalist, and screenwriter whose work has helped bring Galician literature to international audiences. He began working as a journalist while still a teenager and went on to become one of the most prominent literary voices writing in the Galician language. His fiction often explores memory, political repression, environmental concerns, and the resilience of ordinary people under authoritarian rule. His internationally acclaimed novel The Carpenter’s Pencil (O lapis do carpinteiro, 1998) examines the Spanish Civil War through the intertwined lives of a political prisoner and his persecutor. His short-story collection What Do You Want from Me, Love? won Spain’s National Narrative Prize in 1996. Rivas has received numerous other literary honours, including the Spanish Critics’ Prize. His writing combines lyrical language, dark humour, and political engagement, frequently giving voice to people and histories overlooked by official narratives.

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Details
Published
2022
Author
Manuel Rivas