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Literature in Spanish is extremely rich and has left many many great works. Here you have the best ones during the 20^th century. This is, of course, a personal and subjective list, but there is no accounting for taste…

What is your favourite novel? Would you include or remove any novel?

• Cien años de soledad - Gabriel García Márquez

Some say this is the masterpiece by García Márquez, although many others think they are wrong. Some others may have included others; but well, this novel appears in all rankings! It tells the story of the Buendía family throughout seven different generations in the village of Macondo.

• Nada - Carmen Laforet

This first-person narration tells the story of Andrea, a girl who goes to Barcelona to start University, living with some relatives; nevertheless, the world surrounding her will disappoints her. The novel portraits the physical and moral collapse of part of the Spanish society during the first years of the post-war period.

• Los Santos Inocentes - Miguel Delibes

Portrait of the precarious life conditions of a peasant family in Extremadura. The family is crushed by the lords and the misery. It was published as an allegory of the Spain of the possessor and the possessed and as a work about the violation of the relationships between humankind and nature. Mario Camus filmed a movie based in this novel in 1983.

• El Siglo de las Luces - Alejo Carpentier

El siglo de las luces tells the impact of the French Revolution in the Antilles: the dreams for freedom and the shadow of the guillotine. It is essentially the life of a real character, Víctor Hugues, a merchant from the Antilles who sails a world suffering radical changes and fighting for implementing the revolutionary concepts in the isles.

• Los Gozos y las Sombras - Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

The author tells a story taking place in Pueblanueva del Conde, a fictional town in Galicia. Everything stirs up due to Carlos Deza’s back. He is the last one of the Churruchaos, the former lords of the town.

• La Casa de los Espíritus - Isabel Allende

Esteban Trueba, a humble miner with a strong character, escapes from his destiny and reconstruct the old property of his father. He marries Clara, the older sister of his first fiancée (beautiful Rosa), being both the daughters of a rich liberal politician. The novel develops a period of almost a century, telling the stories of Esteban and Clara, their daughter Blanca and Pedro Tercero García, and of Alba and Miguel, both victims of the Chilean military dictatorship.

• La Familia de Pascual Duarte - Camilo José Cela

The main protagonist, Pascual Duarte, lives in rural Extremadura and lacks all kind of social abilities: He only knows one resource for solving problems: violence. The plot is cruel, sordid, with many violent scenes.

• El amor en tiempos de cólera - Gabriel García Márquez

I would not like to explain anything about this novel, since I would prefer you to read it. Most people say García Márquez’s best novel is Cien años de soledad, but I have always preferred this novel, telling the story of three different characters in the beginning of the 20^th century in a coastal town. This is a love story written in an impeccable prose. Ah! Don’t go and watch the movie, that’s cheating!!

• La ciudad de los prodigios - Eduardo Mendoza

In La ciudad de los prodigios, Eduardo Mendoza offers a living portrait of the development of Barcelona as a city, between the Great Universal Exhibitions in 1888 and 1929.This is not a typical historical novel, but a description of the collective memory of a generation of people from Barcelona. Each moment in the life of a city considered to be one of the most European Spanish cities in the future.

• El jinete polaco - Antonio Muñoz Molina

An interpret travelling from, one city to another tells the story of his life to a woman, evoking the voices of the neighbours of Mágina, his birthplace. He talks about his great-grandfather Pedro -who was abandoned at birth and lived in Cuba-, his grandfather -who was in a concentration cam-, his parents -who were peasants- and his own childhood and youth.

• Rayuela -Julio Cortázar

Rayuela, published in 1963, is the most significant novel by the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar. It is considered one of the most influential novels in contemporary Spanish American literature; meaning the consolidation of a highly personal style, rebel and parodic, in which the reader witnesses the destiny of the characters, flowing through the pages and avoiding the typical predetermination of the traditional novel.

• Tiempo de Silencio - Luis Martín Santos

Although the writer finished it at the end of 1960, the novel was published in 1962 and twenty of its pages were censored. In 1981, the final version was published with no kind of censorship. The author moves away from the realistic novel, using three narrative points of view: the inner monologue (like Proust and Joyce), the second person, and the free indirect style.

• La Fiesta del Chivo - Mario Vargas Llosa

La fiesta del chivo is considered a clear example of the language used by Mario Vargas Llosa. The author tells us an important passage in the recent history of the Dominican Republic: the fall of General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, maybe the most bloodthirsty dictator in the recent history of Latin American.

• Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí - Javier Marías

A man is invited to dinner by a woman he almost knows; her husband is in London that night. A 2-year-old boy in the house doesn’t want to go to bed. Finally, when the date starts, the woman starts feeling bad and she finally dies. This is the beginning of the most exciting novels of recent times.

• Soldados de Salamina - Javier Cercas

The title refers to the famous Battle of Salamina, in which the Greeks defeated the Persians, although the plot is only a metaphor of this historic event. The novel is written in first person, as a testimony, and gathers history and fiction, a style that in South America has been called Faction (Fact + Fiction).

• Paisajes después de la batalla - Juan Goytisolo

The variety and richness of the literary registers in Paisajes después de la batalla make this novel a crucial text in Juan Goytisolo’s works. The city, presented as a complex and multi-racial metropolis, a dynamic mixture of cultures and ethnic groups, appears like the fascinating reflection of the author’s personal universe.

• Cuando ya no importe - Juan Carlos Onetti

This is the personal diary of Carr, an intellectual of little standing. His wife decides to leave him and move to another country. This is not a dramatic break-up, but a good opportunity to start again. A good example of the author’s vitality.

• El invierno en Lisboa- Antonio Muñoz Molina

The novel is a tribute to the American film noir and to the dives in which the big musicians created jazz. Santiago Biralbo is a pianist working in the Lady Bird, a pub in San Sebastian. He is not a bad pianist and, maybe for this reason, the place where he works receives lots of visits. One day, a woman called Lucrecia appears and Biralbo’s life changes. Here starts a love story marked by the distance and the fear of taking the next step and consolidate the relationship.

• La Catedral del Mar - Ildefonso Falcones

La catedral del mar is the first novel by Ildefonso Falcones, a Catalonian lawyer specialized in Civil Law. It took him four years to write the novel: he only wrote for an hour in the morning before going to work and then at night. The novel became a total success very soon. In the 14th century, Arnau Estanyol, son of a servant who had escaped, lives in Barcelona. An interesting plot tells us Arnau’s evolution in his attempts to go ahead and progress in society.

• La sombra el viento - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

This novel is an international best-seller and has been translated to 36 different languages. La sombra del viento tells a mysterious story in Barcelona in the middle of the 20^th century. It starts in 1945, when Daniel Sempere accompanies his father to the “Cementerio de los Libros Olvidados” (Cemetery of the Forgotten Books), an amazing and labyrinthine library in which Daniel chooses one book: “La Sombra del Viento”.

• El último Catón - Matilde Asensi

El último Catón is a fiction best-seller. It is temporarily set in present time and tells the story in which a Vatican researcher tries to decipher the mysterious thefts of fragments of the True Cross. A really entertaining novel.

• Donde las mujeres - Álvaro Pombo

Description of the splendour and decadence of an apparent perfect family unit. The older daughter tells the story. She thought that her eccentric mother, her brothers and sisters, her aunt Lucía, and her German lover were superior human beings. A series of events and the revealing of a family secret affect her in a decisive way. This will change the sense of her life.

• Olvidado Rey Gudú - Ana María Matute

The novel tells the birth and expansion of the Kingdom of Olar, in a story speaking about the loss of innocence, the attraction, and the fear of the unknown; the pleasure of the conquest, love, pain, memory, and, above all, oblivion.

• Plata quemada - Ricardo Piglia

This a true story. The plot is set in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where there was an important police case in 1965. In September of that year, a gang robs a bank in San Fernando, in the province of Buenos Aires. During the escape, they decide to betray their mates (politicians and policemen) and they run away with all the money. But the police won’t allow them to go.

• No me esperen en abril - Alfredo Bryce Echenique

Manongo Sterne Tovar is an upper-class teenager in Lima during the 50s. He is extremely sensitive and, after an event at school, he is alone, with no friends and forced to wear dark glasses to “protect himself of others’ looks”. He tries to find some shelter in different kinds of people, until he finds love. But this is just the beginning.

• El maestro de esgrima - Arturo Pérez Reverte

The work is set in Madrid in 1868. The main character, Jaime Astarloa, is a fencing master who works teaching the city nobles. Everything changes when a lady comes to take lessons with Astarloa. He never thought he would get involved like this.

• Carreteras Secundarias - Ignacio Martínez de Pisón

A teenager and his father travel through Spain in 1974. The car, a Citroen ‘Shark’, is the only thing they have. They are always moving from one place to another, but there is always one thing that repeats: all the apartments are located in coastal estates, which are isolated during the low season. They will have to move away from the sea and it will mean a radical change in their lives.

• Si te dicen que caí - Juan Marsé

The sordid everyday life of an already disappeared neighbourhood (Guinardó) is the setting of stories in which satire and sexual violence mix in an extremely richness of feelings and fantasies. Many of these stories are told from children’s invention; children who were born within violence and grew in the streets. This allows the author to create an amazing reality that results strangely usual.

• Crónica de una muerte anunciada - Gabriel García Márquez

Crónica de una muerte anunciada is one of the most important and popular novels by Gabriel García Márquez. It is a journalistic and narrative approach to the detective stories. The novel is inspired in a true event, happened in1951: a crime, its protagonists, the setting, and the circumstances. The author changes these features in a narrative style, although he doesn’t forget the data and the accuracies of the journalistic style.

• Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo

Juan Preciado, as his mother has asked him in her deathbed, starts to look for his father, lost in Comala, a ghost town with a lot of mysterious and enigmatic characters. He will meet different people related to Pedro Páramo, who is thought to be his father. His story mixes with the Mexican Revolution and the story of his father and his lover, and their son.

• La tía Tula - Miguel de Unamuno

This is one of the most famous novels by Unamuno. Although it shares the topics and worries typical of the author’s novel, it includes eroticism, only explicit in a few moments. The novel tells the story of Gertrudis, also called Aunt Tula, and the sacrifices she made during her life to satisfy her longings for being a mother.

• La colmena - Camilo José Cela

The time and space of the novel is very precise: Madrid during some days in 1942, in the Spanish post-war period. The author tried to reflect the social reality of that time, with an objective point of view, although he had to make a selection within that immense period. The novel has three hundred characters, many of them of the low-middle class, the bourgeoisie that is losing its position, that is, people in unstable situations, with an uncertain future.

• La ciudad y los perros - Mario Vargas Llosa

This novel tells the experiences of a student at the Military School Leoncio Prado. Alberto Fernández is in his last year and is willing to go out forever. He only has one friend, Ricardo Arana, called the ‘slave’ because he is a coward and has been always humiliated by his fellows.

• Réquiem por un campesino español - Ramón J. Sender

It tells the most important events in the life of Paco el del Molino. But Paco is not the main character in this story; he is the hero, the most esteemed person in the village, but the character playing the min role is Mosén Millán, the parish priest. He tells us Paco’s life.

• Cinco horas con Mario - Miguel Delibes

This is Carmen’s soliloquy. This high-class conservative woman talks to the corpse of his husband Mario, who has suddenly died. Through evoking the not always happy moments of their life together, Delibes portraits the provincial Spain of that time, the lack of communication of the couples, and the conflict of the “two Spains”.

• Tirano Banderas - Valle-Inclán

Published in 1926, it tells the story of the South American dictator Santos Banderas, a despotic and cruel person who maintains his power thanks to the terror and the oppression. This is an exceptional description of the South American society and the first time that a dictatorship is put in literature.

• El Jarama - Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio

Here, Sánchez Ferlosio tells sixteen hours in the life of eleven friends -a summer Sunday during an excursion to the Jarama riverside. There are three different fronts: the riverbank, Mauricio’s tavern, where the usual clients drink, discuss, and play cards, and the grove at the bank of the Jarama river, where they rest and talk. An unexpected event happened at the end of the day.

• El cuarto de atrás - Carmen Martín Gaite

On an unpleasant night, the writer herself receives a visit: a mysterious character dressed in black. From the relationship with this person, the author evokes is youth memories, some of them in true settings like Salamanca, her birthplace, and others in imaginary places, like the Isle of Bergai.

• Mortal y rosa - Francisco Umbral

This is a difficult novel to read, since it doesn’t have an evident plot. Alt the beginning, it seems that Umbral is writing a personal diary to put in order his thoughts. Nevertheless, the real reason appears later: the loving and poetic relationship with his son, the appearance of a tragic illness and his son’s death (a true event).

• El árbol de la ciencia - Pío Baroja

Although it was published in 1911, the plot is set between 1887 and 1898. It is an almost biographic work divided into two symmetric parts (I-III and V-VII) that are separated by a long philosophical conversation between the main character and his uncle, Doctor Iturrioz (IV). The whole novel tells us the different periods in the life of Andrés Hurtado: a student of Medicine who later works as a doctor in a small village and his experiences.