#RivetingReviews: Rosie Goldsmith reviews SPANISH BEAUTY by Esther García Llovet

Michela McKay is a tough, corrupt and fearless officer in the Spanish National Police Force, Benidorm branch. We’re told early on that she’s on a very specific mission to track down Reggie Kray’s iconic Dunhill lighter. Yes, I was as intrigued as you will be. This is the story of her crazy quest, a short, mind-bending blinder of a novel, with a thoroughly unlikeable protagonist who you nevertheless eventually begrudgingly like, who drinks, takes drugs and kills. Don’t let any of that put you off. Spanish Beauty is a fantastic read.

Esther García Llovet’s ability to sum up the sights, sounds and smells of present-day Benidorm in a few sharp, vivid and perceptive words, makes this, her first novel in English, immediately arresting. It’s been translated into English thanks to the drive and enthusiasm of pioneering new publisher Foundry Editions and its founder-translator Richard Village. However, out of duty of care, I would not recommend the novel to any Benidorm visitors of a sensitive nature. Esther Llovet pens scathing portraits.

Here’s Michela arriving at a beach bar:

She passes a couple sleeping off the night before, a dog rooting around in some Lidl bags, the remains of a bonfire put out with beer. She heads for the beach bar where the music is coming from. It’s something by C. Tangana, playing in stereo from some cheap plastic speakers hanging over the heads of a couple having beer for breakfast and reading The Sun. Sandals, white socks, yellow gold signet ring on the little finger; that’s him. She’s in a wheelchair, ankles like church candles, emerald-green eyeliner, taking photos of the dawn with her phone.

“No photos or videos, madam,” Michela tells her.

Michela speaks impossible cockney, like she’s Hackney born and bred.

Michela’s part-English background, her estranged father’s mysterious association with London crook Reggie Kray, as well as Michela’s personal and professional knowledge of the tourist trade and of Benidorm’s various gangsters and misfits, make her a thrilling companion in her race across Benidorm’s beaches, concrete high-rises and backstreets.

The novel succeeds in its desire to shake-up conventional novel-writing by creating something akin to a fast-paced Netflix series which you binge-watch in one night. (I’m sure this will be filmed or televised one day.) Michela is witty, dry and clever. She reminds me of Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: she’s an antisocial outsider, uncompromising and damaged – and you can’t take your eyes off her.

A street … sneering, a pissed-off, downbeat street – a bit like Michela herself.

Should we, in our existentially threatened modern world, embrace such deeply cynical writing and morally skewed characters? Spanish Beauty, though, is honest, refreshingly direct and wickedly funny. Take this description:

Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of vomit, pissing against walls and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. Chlamydia.

And the sea. Like the desert of the Levant, of the West, of Las Vegas, shadows of skyscrapers on the beach, reaching higher and higher, shadows that go on for miles, stretching over the surface of the lukewarm sea at ten at night whilst families eat fried chicken on the shore, Mediterranean steel Godzillas on the cold dawn sand.

Often enough, at welcome and well-judged moments, the fast pace of the novel slows down. When Michela reflects on her relationship with her absent father Kyle, we get a deeper glimpse into the origins of her angry, restless life. She hadn’t seen her father for years but, apparently, he’s now back in Benidorm from London: why? What will this mean for Michela? And what is the reason behind her pursuit of Reggie Kray’s lighter?

Spanish Beauty is not a novel for tender souls (see above!) but if you’re up for a bracing rollercoaster ride round Benidorm, then give it a go. It’s an exhilarating ride and Esther García Llovet is definitely a star writer; a “cult writer in Spain,” as Foundry Editions informs us. Bravo to them for publishing her, and to Richard Village for his riveting translation.

Reviewed by Rosie Goldsmith

SPANISH BEAUTY

Written by Esther García Llovet

Translated from the Spanish by Richard Village

Published by Foundry Editions

March 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Rosie Goldsmith is Director and Founder of the European Literature Network and Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter. She was a BBC broadcaster for twenty years and is today an arts journalist and presenter. She was chair of the judges for the EBRD Literature Prize 2018–2020.

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