Not long ago, we pointed out that it seems that the interest in publishing decays gradually in Spain. The trend continues. Every time it is these different voices that provide a vision of the world that breaks with the cultural homogeneity that tends to be imposed everywhere. However, some few exceptions allow to open a window to those literatures that come from the margins of the intellectual canon imposed and show that although this planet is very diverse, the problems and questions facing the human being are very similar, regardless of the latitude where it is found.
Rwanda, Algeria, Cameroon, Timor Oriental, Guyana or the Arab world sneak into this lines to show that the horizon of literature is broad and diverse.
Fiction
El Jacarandá De Gaël Faye (Salamandra, 2025. Translation of the French of María Lydia Vázquez Jiménez). Much has been written about it, since its history of its development. Novels like The barefoot y Our Lady of the Nile of Scholastic Mukasonga, O Murambi, the book of bones, Boubacar Boris Diop, are just some of the most outstanding examples. Faye himself treats him in his first novel, Small country. But never before had it been written about what happens years after the end of the tragedy, if it has an end, or how a society survives such a traumatic experience. Issues like, does forgiveness really exist? Is it necessary to forget? Does the victims really find restitution? Can they rebuild their lives after the death of loved ones? What happens to perpetrators and their collaborators? Can they be reintegrated into society? How an event of such magnitude conditions young people who are born years later? These are some of the questions that the author poses in this book. And he does it with that simple, direct, absent style of useless circumloccations and adjectives, with the difficult balance of always being in hypersensitive terrain, without ever falling into sensibility. A story not lacking much pain that, at the same time, travels through the physical changes that Randanda has experienced in the last 30 years.
Huríes, of Kamel Daoud (Cabaret Voltaire, 2025. French translation of Lydia Vázquez Jiménez). The journalist and writer, Daoud, covered some of the most terrible killings that in the 90s of the last century. The fanatic Islamists killed in the name of God and the army responded with great violence obeying orders from an increasingly totalitarian regime. A civil war that, after priming with women and peasants, in the weakest of society, ended with an amnesty and a forgetfulness imposed by the Algiers government that prevented the subject. Daoud defends that, without memory, without repair to the victims or without punishment, a society cannot cure and close their wounds. A hard reading, nothing easy in some moments, which accompanies the pain of a future mother, whose great scar is the proof of what silence wants to deny, that he looks for answers and tells the fetus that he is inside that it is not worth living “in a country that does not love us women, or only at night.”
The Empire of the Captive (II). Continuous present, of Boniface ofogo (, 2025). In the second book of this trilogy, the journalist Clément Boete continues in his country, Titirilandia, where he has traveled from Spain for a personal matter. After 30 years of absence he faces a destroyed society, where corruption invades everything, and the Congosase National (rumors and gossip) are the main source of information from the people. A nation governed by the most long -standing satrap and dictator in which nothing works, except the bars where beer runs. This novel is an acidic and painful satire of the reality of a country that is not entirely imaginary, since it has much in common with the author’s native.
Pigafetta of Luís Cardoso (Armaenia, 2025. Translation of the Portuguese of José Antonio Rocamora). It is a very special novel for how it is written, by what counts and how it counts. A work loaded with magic. Little is known, of its hard history since the Magallanes-El Cano expedition touched land on that island. Later, the country was a Portuguese colony that, after being invaded by Indonesia, had to fight for its independence in a war that filled him with wounds and that only ended when he reached a self -determination referendum agreement. All that is in the background of this book, where the living live with the dead, the story with tradition, wishes with legends. The avatars that the country lived become the thread that joins several stories narrated, very originally, by a sandal, that of the left foot, the side of the heart. Luís Cardoso has turned out to be a revelation in this its first novel translated into Spanish.
Non-fiction
How Europe underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney (Captain Swing, 2025. Beatriz Ruiz translation). Many things have changed in the world, in general, and in Africa, in particular, since Walter Rodney was killed in his native in 1980. But by then his political and social commitment had already made clear. His top work is this essay published for the first time in 1972 and has now been translated into Spanish. It is a deep study that helps to understand the contemporary relations of Africa with the West (Europe and the United States, mainly). A political, economic and historical analysis that deepens slavery and colonialism as the main factors that originate international capitalism. Africa was underdeveloped by the West. Underdevelopment is not a natural characteristic of the continent, but a direct product of the imperialist practices that the West applied in Africa. Clear and concise.
Very interesting part dedicated to the development of African societies before coming into contact with Europe and how the dynamics of exchange interrupted the natural development of these peoples.
A work that, despite the years elapsed, is still very current es Moors against Franco. Spanish anti -fascism and civil war in the Arab world, by Marc Almodóvar and Andreu Rosés (Versos, 2025). Something has been written about the participation of Rife troops in the Spanish Civil War, it is enough to remember the magnificent novel by Youssef El Maimouni When the mountains walk. However, the impact that this contest had in the Arab world had never been treated as a whole. Now, this work studies how the Francoist coup d’etat was lived in Baghdad, Cairo, Alexandria, Algiers, Oran, Jaffa, Damascus or Beirut. The militants of organizations and leftist parties did not keep their arms crossed, organized solidarity campaigns with the Republic: fundraising, drug shipping and, in some cases, they pass weapons clandestinely. Even some of them embark with the volunteers fighting the Spanish fascist front. At the same time, they denounce the colonialist use of Moroccan units at a time that pose the political recomposition of the international left in a world where fascisms are booming. A revelation of a story of which little is known.
