#RivetingReviews: Mandy Wight reviews SÁNCHEZ by Esther Garcia Llovet, translated by Richard Village
This slim novel from Foundry Editions is set in Madrid. However, it’s not the Madrid most tourists, including myself, know and love. You won’t be visiting the Prado here, but rather the bars, dives and gambling dens of the night-time city, the wholesale markets of the early hours, the bushes, scrubland and cruddy car parks of the outer suburbs. It’s a gangster story, narrated by Nikki, whom we first meet parked up in her car, observing a scene by a vending machine in which she recognises her old mate and ex, Sánchez. She calls him over, he gets in the car and joins Nikki in her latest hustle: to find her friend Beltrán and to make some money by selling his greyhound, Cromwell, as a racing dog.
Narrated in the fast-paced, short sentences of the crime thriller, we learn more about our protagonists as they drive through the city. Sánchez used to run underground gambling in a nail bar; he rented out places in the miracles queue at Christ of Medinaceli church – till he got beaten up by the Poles who ran that turf. He disappeared to Paraguay, and reappeared, now renting out show flats, still with ‘his fiesta swagger, like a handsome man who’d gone to seed’. Nikki’s done all sorts too – stealing the copper from streetlamps and selling it all over Spain, doing ‘a bit of work with some cable installers’. She used to run the La Racha bar and was a linguist before that, her only comment on that career change: ‘it’s amazing how being penniless will make you shameless too.’
Esther García Llovet’s cinematic eye can be seen in the terrific descriptions of place here. I loved the account of the Mercamadrid market: ‘row after row of three-metre tunas hanging from cranes … like they were putting up a barrier that went on forever, a huge barricade of black glistening frozen tunas.’There’s a witty economy in her take onthe Chinese restaurant at the Plaza de Castilla bus station, where ‘they recycled noodles and rice and prawn tails at breakneck speed to feed the left-over people waiting for their night buses, people out on the piss, girls with tattoos who pass round chopsticks and chlamydia and boyfriends free of charge’.
There are some punchy descriptions of the several characters they meet, too, like the Twins, ‘identical, but completely different. Tilda was all brains, razor-sharp thinking and self-control, the other one holy fury’. We seetranslator Richard Village not only at ease with the underworld lexis here but having a great feel for pace and rhythm too.
There are some moments of comedy when Nikki and Sánchez finally meet up with Beltrán and the dog Cromwell, but whether he makes any money for them is not resolved. This didn’t detract from my enjoyment though. For me, it was all about the ride through the unsung places of night-time Madrid. I won’t be walking through Retiro Park again without seeing those giant slabs of tuna in my mind’s eye.
Reviewed by Mandy Wight
SÁNCHEZ
Written by Esther García Llovet
Translated by Richard Village
Published by Foundry Editions (2026)
June 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Mandy Wight has published several translations from German on the No-Mans-Land Website, including excerpts from novels by Ursula Krechel, Nina Jäckle, Ulrike Edschmid, Natascha Wodin and Monika Helfer. In 2018 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation for her translation of an extract from Juli Zeh’s novel Unterleuten. She writes on books in English and in translation at her blog Peakreads.
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