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Charco Press has signed Last Date in El Zapotal, the debut novel from Mateo García Elizondo, the grandson of Gabriel García Márquez.
Director and publishing director Carolina Orloff acquired world English rights from Laura Palomares at Balcells Literary Agency. The novel will be published on 25th June 2024 and translated by Robin Myers.
Last Date in El Zapotal won the City of Barcelona Award for fiction written in Spanish and tells the story of a drug addict who goes to the town of El Zapotal to die. The publisher continued: "He plans to melt into one last fix and not come back, yet for someone so ready to leave this world, he can’t stop clinging to the past, and he continues to reflect on it. As the drugs run out, the line between what’s real and what’s not blurs to the point of illegibility, and readers are left wandering a tenderly described hinterland of despair, hunger and regret."
Elizondo commented: "‘I’m really excited for my work to finally be reaching English-speaking readers thanks to Charco Press, a publisher that is doing really invaluable work to take literature from Latin America to new places. They have made me very welcome alongside authors and translators I admire, and I feel fortunate to be among them."
Orloff added: "We are over the moon to be publishing Mateo’s first novel and to be bringing his work to readers in the English-speaking world. Last Date in El Zapotal has been considered one of the most promising debut novels to be published recently in Spanish, and we are extremely honoured to be including it in our catalogue. Evoking Juan Rulfo’s ground-breaking Pedro Páramo, this book provides an extraordinary experience that will stay with readers forever."