A Luminous Republic

Lord of the Flies meets Javier Marias, a dark and glinty literary gem with huge potential.

One day, the children begin to show up in the subtropical town of San Cristobal, unwashed and hungry. No one knows where they have come from or where they disappear to each night. And then they rob a supermarket and stab two adults, bringing fear to the town.

So begins a thrilling morality tale that retraces the lines between good and evil, the civil and the wild, dragging our assumptions about childhood and innocence out into the light.

'Engaging, at times playful, wholly compelling'
- Colm Toibin

'At first you will feel fear, but what you feel next is something much deeper, disturbing and luminous'
- Samanta Schweblin

About the Authors

Andres Barba is the author of twelve novels, including Such Small Hands (Granta, 2017). He has worked as a teacher of Spanish to foreigners at Complutense University in Madrid and now gives writing workshops. He was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish Novelists. His writing has been translated into twenty languages.

Lisa Dillman is professor of pedagogy at Emory University. In 2016 she won the Best Translated Book Award for Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World. In 2017, her translation of Barba's Such Small Hands was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.