The Last Day of Terranova

The Last Days of Terranova tells of "Vicenzo Fontana", the elderly ownerof the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it’s set to close due tothe greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, he spends the nightin his beloved store filled with more than seventy years of fugitivehistories. Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novelferries us back to his childhood, when his father first opened the store, tothe years that the store was run by his Uncle "Eliseo", and to the years inthe lead-up to the democratic transition, which Vicenzo spent as far away fromthe bookstore as possible, in Madrid. Like the bookstore itself, The Last Daysof Terranova is a space crammed with stories, histories, and literaryreferences, and as many nooks, crannies, and complexities, brought to life inRivas’s vital prose.