Anxos Sumai

Harvest Moon Anxos Sumai

Nuria Uría lives in Madrid. She designs floral motifs for a ceramics factory in Lisbon. But one August she is driven to rent an apartment overlooking a beach in the Arousa estuary in west Galicia, the selfsame beach where she made love with a boy from school, Quin, twenty years earlier. Back then they had had the beach pretty much to themselves, but one day construction had begun on a block of apartments, and Nuria had promised herself she would come to live there one day. She has visions, everything seems somehow familiar. She also suffers from nightmares. People seem to recognize her, but she can't remember who they are. On the fourth floor live a couple, Luis and Happy, with their dog, Iggy. The third floor is occupied by the building's architect, Vidal, a keen photographer. And then there is the painter of seascapes and white walls, Tomás Induvina, who has a warehouse on the outskirts of Madrid and who falls in love with a performance artist much younger than him, named Bet. Nuria hopes the return to the Galicia of her youth will enable her to reconstruct herself, to bring herself back together, but is she deceived? Anxos Sumai has won many literary awards, including the San Clemente Award for her novel That's How Whales Are Born, published in English translation by Small Stations Press in 2017, and the García Barros Award and the Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician fiction for Harvest Moon. Carys Evans-Corrales's translations from Galician include fiction by Xurxo Borrazás, Miguel-Anxo Murado and Anxos Sumai, and poetry by Pilar Pallarés. She has written an account of her life on three continents, Talking Girl: A Memoir, which was published in 2014.