Gabriela Ybarra
Gabriela Ybarra was born in Bilbao, Spain, in 1983. She currently lives in Madrid were she writes and works in social media analysis. The Dinner Guest is her first novel and was published to critical acclaim in Spain, where it won the Euskadi Literature Prize 2016, and in the UK, where it was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. She occasionally writes for El País.
Titles by Gabriela Ybarra
Gabriela Ybarra
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize
In 1977, three terrorists broke into Gabriela Ybarra’s grandfather’s home, and pointed a gun at him in the shower. This was the last time his family saw him alive, and his kidnapping played out in the press, culminating in his murder. Ybarra first heard the story when she was eight, but it was only after her mother’s death, years later, that she felt the need to go deeper and discover more about her family’s past.
The Dinner Guest is a novel with the feel of documentary nonfiction. It connects two life-changing events—the very public death of Ybarra’s grandfather, and the more private pain as her mother dies from cancer and Gabriela cares for her. Devastating and luminous, the book is an investigation, marking the arrival of a talented new voice in international fiction.