Why a Booktrail?
2000s: The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets.
Woodworm
What you need to know before your trail
The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.
Nobody ever leaves.
The house was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave.
They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy from a local wealthy family draws unwanted press attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.
Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun.
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Castilla la Mancha
Castilla-La Mancha is a region in central Spain to the south and east of Madrid. The setting of 17th-century novel “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, it encompasses plains dotted with vineyards, castles and windmills, plus mountain ranges. The house in this book is surrounded by rural landscape.
The translators say of the fact that the novel is set in a house:
“A haunted house is a great metaphor for a book in the process of being translated. The translator, or translators, must inhabit this fictional space, alert to shadowy presences and unspoken suggestions, to what might be lurking in the wardrobe or under the bed.”
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Woodworm
Destination/Location: Castilla–La Mancha Author/guide: Layla Martinez Departure: 2000s
Back to ResultsWhere Next?
