Books in the Galician Wave series

Wolfram (or tungsten), because of its hardness and high density, was an important raw material for the arms industry during the Second World War. The main European source of this element was Portugal, which was therefore put under pressure by both the Allies and the Nazis, but Galicia in north-west Spain, sitting on top of Portugal, was also an important source. Hence the 'fever' referred to in the title of this book. Not only did the Germans set up official mines in Galicia to extract wolfram, but there were lots of unofficial miners hoping to make a quick buck. Carmucha's father, Matías, had been roped into becoming the president of the Casino Club in Noia, a small coastal town twenty miles west of Santiago de Compostela, making him part of the establishment, but Carmucha is her own woman and she prefers to sell to the English. This will bring her into conflict with Yellow, a civil guard with his finger on the pulse of the illegal trade in wolfram, who doesn't like his interests being interfered with. It will also bring her into contact with an English agent, Colin, who offers her a much higher price than that being paid on the market. Against a backdrop of Allied-Axis conflict, in a Spain under Franco's dictatorship, Carmucha will need to walk a very fine line between opposing interests if she doesn't want to end up dead in a ditch. She will need to do this with or without the support of her father, with whom she has a difficult relationship and who always seems to want to rein her in. Héctor Carré is a Galician film director and writer who has worked on international films such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. His first full-length movie, Burn Me, was nominated for a Goya award. His novel Fever won the prestigious Caixa Galicia Foundation Prize for Young People's Literature in 2011.

Auria is almost fifteen. In the summer of 1991, she bumps into the parish priest, Salvador, on a street of her home town. During the month of August, he is organizing a pilgrimage lasting twenty-two days to Częstochowa, a city in Poland, to celebrate World Youth Day. Auria is taken aback when he invites her to join the pilgrimage, but when her mother supports the idea, she decides to take a risk. Her mother, Luísa, works as a seamstress and is always telling Auria not to make the same mistakes she did, getting pregnant when she was only eighteen and having to raise a child on her own. There's no danger of that, thinks Auria. She has no interest whatsoever in men. But this new trip - which will take in such places as Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Venice - will bring her into close contact with Paio, Salvador's cousin once removed, and what was previously unthinkable may actually happen, she may actually experience all the intensity of first love. Auria shares all the events of that fateful summer with her diary, her new best friend, a diary she decides to call Merche. Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's best-known writers of young adult fiction and is the recipient of the Spanish National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Her novel Dove and Cut Throat, a charming story about a boy who gets bullied at school and who is torn between the two girls in his life - a classmate, Halima, and a girl he has met on the Internet, Dove - is also published in English by Small Stations Press.

Paulo's grandfather suffers from Alzheimer's. The one person he never forgets is his grandson, Paulo, even though he calls him Sinbad the Sailor and they have adventures together at sea (in the sitting room), fighting the filibusters. One Sunday, Paulo's grandfather goes missing, and Paulo will have to find out where he is.

The 'barefoot shadow' in this story is Elsa's great-aunt, Sagrario, who always goes about the house without shoes. A sense of guilt hangs around the figure of her great-aunt, which intrigues Elsa. When Sagrario dies and turns up in the coffin wearing a pair of pretty high heels, she is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery.

The Luzada is a café in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia. The café has its share of cosmopolitan visitors and different languages who share the smoky atmosphere and the products of the coffee machine. Everyone's fears and aspirations seem to find a shelter in this place, albeit some are on the table, while others remain hidden.

The Roman poet Ovid's famous book of poetry Metamorphoses contains a succession of women who are changed into something else after they have been raped. One of these is Medusa, the Gorgon, daughter of the sea deities (and also siblings) Phorcys and Ceto. She is reputed to have been a ravishingly beautiful maiden, with striking hair, who received the attention of many suitors. She was raped by the god of the sea, Neptune, in Minerva's temple. In anger at this desecration of her temple, Minerva turned Medusa's hair into serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that it would turn any who looked at it into stone. The Greek hero Perseus, son of Jupiter and the mortal Danaë, was sent by the king of Seriphos, Polydectes, who desired Perseus' mother and wished to get Perseus out of the way, to behead the Gorgon. For this purpose, he received help from the gods: a shield of polished bronze, winged sandals, an adamantine sword and Hades' helm of darkness (or invisibility cloak). According to the myth, he beheaded her in her sleep and used her head as a weapon before giving it to Minerva. But who is the real victim here? Medusa suffers for her beauty. She is raped by a god and punished by another. People then avoid looking her in the eye in case they are turned to stone. And how does the myth of Medusa relate to two students in Galicia in their final year at school, Sofía and Lupe, who after a fancy-dress dinner, in the early hours of the morning, are picked up by two men and sexually assaulted? What will the reaction of their classmates be? Will they be prepared to look them in the eye? And how will the girls themselves respond to this assault in a society that may prefer to sweep its acts of indecency under the carpet and turn a blind eye? Head of Medusa is a story of wrongdoing, friendship, renewal and moral courage.

Clara Soutelo is a sixteen-year-old girl who spends her summers in the town of Vilarelle in Galicia. She descends from a well-to-do family that was on the winning side in Spain's Civil War and that occupies the manor house in Vilarelle. All the local families look up to them, and Clara has taken this attitude for granted. That is until the summer of 1995, when a skeleton is discovered in the manor house during restoration work. It has been walled up for many years, perhaps since the time of the Civil War, and the skull has a bullet hole. Clara also discovers a ring bearing the initial "R". What is the identity of the victim, and who wielded the murder weapon? The search for the discovery of the truth will lead Clara into her family's inglorious past through the witness of the town's inhabitants, and will also sow the seeds of romance between her and a young mechanic by the name of Miguel, descendant of the bookbinder Ishmael, with whom she shares the secret pleasure of reading. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Heart of Jupiter" by Ledicia Costas, "I Love You Leo A. Destination Somewhere" by Rosa Aneiros, "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" by Elena Gallego Abad, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "Dove and Cut Throat" by Fina Casalderrey.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown," writes H. P. Lovecraft at the start of his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". In real life, the author Agustín Fernández Paz, Galicia's answer to H. P. Lovecraft, is reading the newspaper and comes across a classified ad for a haunted house. He imagines what would happen if someone answered that ad. Then what would happen if they went to see the house and liked it. Then what would happen if they had enough money and decided to buy it. And finally what would happen if they went to live there and discovered that the house was really haunted. This is the plot of "Winter Letters", one of the best-selling Galician novels of all time. The house will bring to mind, for older readers, the Bates' home in Alfred Hitchcock's film "Psycho". Inside the house is a book of prints that may remind younger readers of Tom Riddle's diary in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets". However this may be, the reader is sure to be drawn in by the force and power of the narrative, which is as smooth and sinuous as the sirens' song heard by Ulysses from the sanctuary of the mast of his ship. Agustín Fernández Paz is the author of another novel in English, "Black Air", about a psychiatrist's race against time to save his patient from a malignant presence, the Great Beast. He was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature in 2008 and is Spain's nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" and "Dragal II: The Dragon's Metamorphosis" by Elena Gallego Abad, "Dove and Cut Throat" by Fina Casalderrey, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "I Love You Leo A. Destination Somewhere" by Rosa Aneiros.

André Santomé Lobeira is a teenager whose parents divorced when he was five. He puts on a front at school to defend himself against the bullies Raúl Pernas and Héctor Solla, who do everything they can to make his life miserable. He starts deliberately getting low marks in the hope they will ignore him. This encourages his grandfather to intervene, and André goes to live with his grandparents, who run a restaurant, The Birdhouse, in the garden of which his grandfather has an orphanage for birds. André finds a baby cut-throat finch, a finch with a red line across its neck, and keeps it as a pet. He is torn between two girls - Halima, a Moroccan girl in his class whose mother died as they were crossing into Spain, who helps him stand up to the bullies; and Dove, a girl he meets on the Internet, who helps him with his homework and when his grandfather falls ill. Dove arranges for them to meet in person, but André is afraid this will ruin their friendship and feels a strange sense of betrayal to the other girl in his life, Halima. He almost wishes Dove had never arranged their meeting... Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's foremost writers of young adult fiction, with over forty works to her name. She is the recipient of the Spanish National Prize for Literature and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Black Air" by Agustín Fernández Paz, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" by Elena Gallego Abad.