LOS CINCO Y YO

Toni feels that he is a writer who never writes and a teacher who never teaches. He grew up reading adventure stories such as the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton, which offered him something 1970s Spain could not: unsupervised fun and freedom of movement, in other words the boundless world he yearned for in the vital transition to adolescence. During the course of this novel, those characters so envied by Toni as a boy seem to grow and become flesh and blood beings like him, while he travels in the opposite direction and ends up being what he always wanted to be: one of them. A grippingly original novel which sometimes reads like a memoir and sometimes as troubling indictment, moving between anecdote, satire and a personal theory of story telling. Brilliant and funny, Orejudo pays homage while also settling accounts with his own generation.