Open Heart: A Novel

(Paperback)

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This intimate family novel that follows the rise and fall of a great love is also a moving tribute to the generation that struggled to survive in Spain after the Civil War. In Open Heart, Elvira Lindo tells the story of her parents-the story of an excessive love, passionate and unstable, forged through countless fights and reconciliations, which had a profound effect on their entire family. Manuel Lindo came from nothing, but stubbornly worked his way up at the Dredging and Construction Company. Obliged to move from city to city for his job, the family couldn't put down roots, and Elvira and her siblings' childhood was marked by unpredictability. As they pass through temporary homes, they're caught between Manuel's outsized temper and their young mother's worsening illness, which would tragically take her life. Beginning with nine-year-old Manuel's experience in Madrid in 1939, Open Heart takes us on a sweeping journey through Spain full of beautifully observed insights about love in its many forms.

Reviews

The title of Open Heart gestures to the authors courage to probe her familys anatomyelegantly translated by Adrian Nathan West, the narrative knits into itself, a dreamlike and reiterative bundle of crisscrossing timelines and remembrances. New York Times Book Review

Lindos Open Heart is an exploration of the imperfect ways we love each other and how we forgive. She has done something wonderful here, given us a novel that is akin to a master sculptors high relief, where we see pictures of one family at different stages, with enough unsparing yet loving detail to see each life individually in all its broken beauty. Rubn Degollado, author of The Family Izquierdo

An excellent novel that dissects the influence of family environment and the enduring imprint of the past.La Razn

[Lindos] masterpiece.Babelia, El Pas

A magnificent novel.Juan Jos Mills, author of From the Shadows

Author Bio

Elvira Lindo was born in Cadiz, Spain. Before becoming a fiction writer, she was a presenter, actress, and scriptwriter for television and radio. Lindo received the Atlantida Prize from the Editors Union of Catalonia and the Biblioteca Breve Prize for her novel Una palabra tuya. In addition to authoring numerous other successful books, including the international bestselling Manolito Gafotas series, Lindo is a frequent contributor to the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais. Adrian Nathan West is a writer and literary critic based in Spain. He has translated more than twenty books, among them Rainald Goetz's Insane and Sibylle Lacan's A Father- Puzzle.