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. Aged between nine and thirteen, the children are covered in dirt and hungry. They beg food, commit small acts of vandalism, play games that don't seem to have any rules, and communicate with each other in a strange language. No one knows where they come from or where they disappear to each night. And then, they rob a supermarket and stab two adults, bringing fear to the town. Thus begins a fearsome and thrilling modern morality tale that retraces the lines between good and evil, the civilised and the wild, and drags our assumptions about childhood and innocence out into the light.

About the Author

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.

About the Translator

Lisa Dillman is a senior lecturer at Emory University. She won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World and the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her translation of Such Small Hands.