WINNER OF AN ENGLISH PEN AWARD
‘Effortlessly readable and fizzing with energy, this novel is by turns quirky, funny and thoughtful’ Mail on Sunday
Dani Mosca is 40 and his father has just died.
Fulfilling his father’s last wishes, Dani embarks on a road trip back to his childhood village, a three-hour hearse journey from Madrid. Leaving behind the busy streets of the city for the deserted, archaic heart of Spain, Dani revisits the key junctions of his life: his conflicted relationship with a pragmatic and authoritarian father; the mystery of his birth; his school years in the repressed atmosphere of Catholic Spain; the origin of his band and its early successes; the emptiness left by a tragically lost friendship; his great loves.
Laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving and featuring an unforgettable cast of characters – from Ecuadorian drivers to Spanish Bowie lookalikes – Rolling Fields is a novel full of the grace and messiness of life: brave, exciting and completely irresistible.
Translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery
‘Effortlessly readable and fizzing with energy, this novel is by turns quirky, funny and thoughtful’ Mail on Sunday
Dani Mosca is 40 and his father has just died.
Fulfilling his father’s last wishes, Dani embarks on a road trip back to his childhood village, a three-hour hearse journey from Madrid. Leaving behind the busy streets of the city for the deserted, archaic heart of Spain, Dani revisits the key junctions of his life: his conflicted relationship with a pragmatic and authoritarian father; the mystery of his birth; his school years in the repressed atmosphere of Catholic Spain; the origin of his band and its early successes; the emptiness left by a tragically lost friendship; his great loves.
Laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving and featuring an unforgettable cast of characters – from Ecuadorian drivers to Spanish Bowie lookalikes – Rolling Fields is a novel full of the grace and messiness of life: brave, exciting and completely irresistible.
Translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery
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Reviews
Breezy, bittersweet and tangential, Trueba's prose captures the rueful regrets of a man who's searching for meaning and redemption in a life that's short on both.
An effortless, fast-paced and light-hearted yet tremendously good piece of fiction.
A stunningly lucid novel, well written and elegant, but never cold.
David Trueba's skilfully crafted novel is fast-moving and full of sparkle, but with a deeper pull beneath the surface ... It is a novel that tackles the chaos of life nakedly and nobly
Incisive and bittersweet.
Effortlessly readable and fizzing with energy, this novel is by turns quirky, funny and thoughtful.
Trueba writes about everyday life with a redemptive epic while avoiding sentimental pornography and cynicism. He wants to know who he is while we the readers try to figure out how is it possible that his experience of life looks so much like ours.
Lively and bittersweet.
Writing that is both warm and charming.
A beautiful novel that blends drama and irony.
Funny, poignant, full of honesty and warmth
A funny and bitter novel, full of intelligence and energy. It shows some of the miseries and the modest grandeur of life. The character's self-criticism is brave, exciting, and realistic. With a skillful and stimulating taste for risk, it combines many issues and registers: from rock mythology to family melodrama, from John Irving to Rafael Azcona.
What holds the attention is the evocation of a culture trying to break free of rural, religious and Franco-ist ties. Dani's wistful search for validation - from music, sex, or his father - adds a thoughtful dimension.
The novel can be read from several perspectives, all of them enriching the reading experience: the difficulty of growing up with no roots; the deep marks left by love and desire; identity as a work in progress; and the porous connection between life and art.
The narrative richness of the book is outstanding. Trueba has an instinct to extract from the language its paradoxes with a grace that comes only from a delicate attention to people's conversations (...) The novel shines even brighter as life flirts with death and the ballad becomes sad.