Translation Rights TQE / Eve’s Daughters

Hijas de Eva (Eve’s Daughters) is set in the year 1917.  Fausta and Rosilda, two cousins born at the turn of the century, have grown up in distant towns and have never met each other. Chance brings them together in a Valencian orphanage, where they both apply to be nuns and where they have gone to escape from their respective families. But they soon come to see that this place is not the pious shelter of peace and devotion which they have imagined and that its reality is of a very different nature. They decide to unite their destinies and escape. Alone and penniless, condemned to drift around aimlessly, but provided with the strength of those who seek happiness, the chaste Fausta and her bright cousin Rosilda set out on a difficult journey in which they meet a series of curious characters who, each in his own cunning way, is trained in the picaresque of survival. Led through their adventures and misfortunes, the reader wonders whether Fausta and Rosilda will ever reach the target they seek in that  “valley of tears” to which they seem predestined.

Justifying the break with the past as the only means of escaping the “prison of losers” which a woman’s life inevitably becomes, Manuel Talens devises a story which is half way between the picaresque novel and the chronicle of a sentimental education.

Manuel Talens was born in Granada in 1948, and graduated from the city’s university with a degree in medicine. He later completed his studies in Paris and Montreal. Upon his return to Spain, he settled in Valencia, where he decided to dedicate himself to literature. Alongside his work as a novelist, he regularly collaborates in the opinion columns of the Valencian edition of the newspaper El País. He has also translated into Spanish works of fiction and semiotic texts, cinema and narrative.