Sjon’s latest novel, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Books, 145 pages), set in Reykjavik in 1918, is the story of sixteen-year-old Máni Steinn (a.k.a. Moonstone). The boy’s guardian is “the old lady”—his grandmother’s sister who took him in after his mother died when he was just six. They live with “the landlord,” a man she raised as a nanny and who lets them stay in his garret space rent-free. To the concern of the old lady, Máni is “such a loner that rather than go out and play with his classmates he preferred to hang […]
Tag: Spanish
The Best Way to Talk About Loneliness and Loss: Q&A with Santiago Roncagliolo
by Oscar Villalon
Born in Peru, and now living in Barcelona, author Santiago Roncagliolo was named as one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists a few years back. Noted for being the youngest person to win the prestigious Alfaguara Prize (for his novel Red April, which was published in English in 2010), Roncagliolo is also a translator, a children’s book author, a newspaper contributor, and a soap opera writer. His past work has examined the horrors of the Sendero Luminoso in Peru as well as the sex trade in Tokyo, but in his latest book in English, Hi, This Is Conchita and Other […]