'A force of nature. It leaves you stranded on a rich and prophetic insular world of women and low, grey, clouds that merge with the sea' Pilar Quintana
A debut novel about a long, hot summer in the Canary Islands and the friendship between two young girls
Bold, dazzling, hilarious. Andrea Abreu is a lively meteorite in the landscape of Hispanic LiteratureLike the tide. A force of nature. It drags you. It submerges you. And, all of a sudden, it leaves you stranded on a rich and prophetic insular world of women and low, grey, clouds that merge with the sea. It is pure poetry. A book that carries you and makes you feel a place
Andrea Abreu's characters, like her sentences, are bold and wild. Reminiscent of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening, Abreu's writing twirls and clacks with tactile precision, like winding a cassette tape with a No. 2 pencil. I'll return to Dogs of Summer whenever I crave a searing, brutal shot of lifeI am overwhelmed. What a marvelous book, what a miracleAndrea turns up a notch, or turns it up ten times, in this rescue of poetic tremendismo (expressionist dirty realism). A political book: for the world that has never been given a voice before, and most of all for the phonetical shamelessness, for the syntactical violence, for the incorrectness, the localisms, the linguistic variety, because Andrea Abreu writes for her body and from her body
It describes the state of things without beating around the bush giving way to the purest form of tenderness, innocence, and care ... It intertwines the feeling of the first love with the pain that comes with growing upDogs of Summer weaves a powerful narrative, where bodies and hunger take over the story. It transports us to the threshold of puberty, to face a disturbing procession of fears, euphoria and daily violence. An unsweetened and unprejudiced portrait of poverty. Pure lifeShit. My brain just exploded. What a marvelRazor sharp and mesmerizing, Dogs of Summer will thump through your heart and mind. A novel that consumes and sentences to die forThis slim novel's scope and intensity are shockingly, magnificently large, and the sentences blast off the pages with all the sordidness and wonder of early adolescence. Readers will be unable to resist the spell of Dogs of Summer, a hilarious, devastating story that is brilliantly attuned to the erotics of friendship, the intoxicating muddle of identification and desire, and the power of both the sublime and the profane. The unforgettable girls at the center of Andrea Abreu's moving debut are two of the liveliest fictional creations I've come across in quite a long timeAndrea Abreu's characters, like her sentences, are bold and wild. Reminiscent of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening, Abreu's writing twirls and clacks with tactile precision, like winding a cassette tape with a No. 2 pencil. I'll return to Dogs of Summer whenever I crave a searing, brutal shot of lifeDogs of Summer shows girlhood as it really was: brutal and tender, intimate and lonely, magical and utterly gross. I loved itNothing else matters in the world of Dogs of Summer other than what these two girls mean to each other. Every crushing, toxic, excruciating, loving, difficult and unboundaried female friendship came hurtling back to me in a tumultuous wave while reading this book, all the sores and salves of a coming-of-age relationship are here in details that feel almost too sacred to be told, but universalised in their telling. I have a new favourite writer, I will read everything she writes. I love it, I love it, I love it!Andrea Abreu (Tenerife, 1995) studied journalism at La Laguna University and moved to Madrid in 2017 to study a masters. She is a regular contributor for
Tentaciones-El País,
LOLA (
BuzzFeed),
Vice,
Zenda and
Quimera, among others. Her debut novel,
Panza de Burro, was first published in Spain to great acclaim. In 2021, Andrea Abreu was included in
Granta's new selection in a decade of the Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists.