Bernardo Atxaga – författare

Nevada Days is a fictionalised account of Atxaga''s nine months'' stay as writer-in-residence at the Centre for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada. He is accompanied by his wife, Ángela, who is also doing research there, and by their two daughters. During their first few weeks, the family encounter a strange mapache (racoon), which is always staring at them from the garden, a flight of helicopters immediately overhead, a black widow spider, a warning about bears, a party of prisoners in the desert, a lake that is somehow far too calm and too blue, and, not long into their stay, the kidnap and murder of a young girl living in the house right next door.Atxaga tells us about all these strange encounters, and about his colleagues at the university, about the trips the family make to California and across the Sierra Nevada and to Lake Tahoe, but this narrative is also interspersed with accounts of his dreams, with stories from his past.Nevada Days seductively weaves together past and present, and shows us how deeply marked we are by experience and history and relationships, however fleeting or enduring, and reminds us what a very strange thing life is.Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

A story of intertwining lives that, like water, run between stones.From childhood friends in a bakery in the mining town of Ugarte, Basque Country, to a group of comrades and their pet magpie in a military base in the dying days of Franco''s dictatorship, and eventually adults with the weight of their existence on their backs, the interconnected stories of the protagonists of Water over Stones span several decades of Spanish history, as Ugarte moves from the hazy summer of the 1972 Olympics, through the mining strikes of the turbulent Eighties, and into the modern day.Water over Stones is an extraordinary novel of friendship, nature, love and the immensity of death. Once again, Atxaga shows his mastery in creating places and characters that are impossible to forget.Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Margaret Jull-Costa

A perceptive, moving novel about life and death in the Basque Country, from the author of Nevada Days.Bernardo Atxaga’s Water over Stones follows a group of interconnected people in a small village in the Basque Country. It opens with the story of a young boy who has returned from his French boarding school to his uncle’s bakery, where his family hopes he will speak again. He’s been silent since an incident in which he threw a stone at a teacher for reasons unknown. With the assistance of twin brothers who take him to a river in the forest, he’ll recover his speech. As the years pass, those twins, now adults, will be part of a mining strike in the Ugarte region, and so take up the mantle of the narrative, just as others will after them.Water over Stones is similar in nature to Atxaga’s earlier books Obabakoak and The Accordionist’s Son, as it weaves in themes of friendship, nature, and death. Yet in capturing a span of time from the early 1970s, when the shadow of the Franco dictatorship still loomed, to 2017, when these boys must learn to leave their old beliefs behind and move on, Atxaga finds new richness and depth in familiar subjects. As threads of water run over stones in the river, so these lives run together, and, over time, technology and industry bring new changes as the wheel of life turns.