Excerpt from The Wonders by Elena Medel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In the beginning, with Nando in the city, she resisted her urges, afraid she'd be found out. But then it happened one day: red tape at the social security office, a guy younger than her in the waiting room insisting on showing her the book he was reading. Alicia finds her body more and more shameful all the time, so it was a chance she seized.

The Atocha traffic circle is virtually deserted, not many cars, not many pedestrians: a few minutes till sunrise. On Cuesta de Moyano, the stall shutters are still down; several purple dots—she can barely make them out in the distance, the women—stacking up placards near the carousel. She heard on TV about something happening today, but then she gets distracted, the walk sign comes on, she crosses over to the station, her mind on matters closer to home. Maria sleeps soundly—like a log. When she retired, she put her alarm clock in a plastic bag and left it on the association's secondhand shelf for anyone who might need it. She'd gone years without using it—like everyone, she'd replaced it with the one on her cell phone instead—but the gesture seemed symbolic, like something out of someone else's story: now that I won't be needing it anymore, she thought, why shouldn't it be of use to someone who does, an object in another story whose protagonist leaves the house before dawn? She almost always wakes up unaided anyway, stirring when the light filters through the blinds or the person in the adjacent apartment gets in the shower. They started preparing for this day months ago. Last night, signing off on WhatsApp, Laura wrote, "Can't believe it's really happening." At assemblies, at district meetings, María always tries to stop the younger girls from getting too excited, but now she's excited, too: my whole life, the near seventy years I've lived, it's all led to waking up today, being here at your gathering, walking beside you. They were briefed at the association: do whatever you want, a paid work strike, a consumer strike, a care strike. Choose whatever works for you, because for us it all works, and we aren't here to hand out badges for who's the best feminist. My husband will notice if I don't have a meal ready for him. Well, then, Amalia, put some soup in a Tupperware and tell him he can warm it up himself. Can't he even manage that? Give him a microwave class next week, beginners' level. I have to work, I can't afford not to get paid, but I'll meet up with you later on at Atocha. Does taking care of yourself count? I'm thinking of running a hot bath before I leave the house in the morning, soaking till I wrinkle up like a prune. Sure, why not, today's about taking care of ourselves and our sisters.

The previous afternoon, several of them had met up at the association: some busied themselves making sandwiches for whoever would be out in the streets today, spreading the word to the women leaving the grocery store and the ones who'd gone in to work; others opted not to strike but showed up early at the headquarters to talk about events in different cities, and here in their own. Does listening to the radio count as a strike? Watching what's happening online? They uncovered a foil-wrapped tray and passed out pieces of sponge cake. They had baked empanadas, the girls made hummus and guacamole, one of the veterans dunked a spoon in the clay pot as if it were soup or custard, to the girls' delight: that's not how you eat hummus. It seemed too modern to her, and she thought of her mother, who'd lived through the war and would never have wasted ingredients on that slop: where d'you think you're from, the Nile or Carabanchel, because here in Carabanchel we put chickpeas in a stew. While they were making chorizo-and-salami sandwiches, cutting them into triangles, wrapping them in plastic, stacking them in the fridge to hand out the next day, María listed all the protests and strikes she hadn't taken part in: the ones against Suárez in the seventies, before the elections and then afterward, the one against NATO, the one for pensions in '85, the strike of '88 and the two in the nineties, Iraq and the "No to War" one, the one in 2010, the two in 2012—the one here against Rajoy, and the Europe one—the freedom train, pro-choice. The Tides, remembers another girl, already university-aged, you were there for the Green Tide, she says, and María recounts how at one of the demonstrations, a reporter asked her if she was protesting on behalf of her granddaughter, and she, not knowing how to respond, said that yes, she was, for her granddaughter and for all of her granddaughter's friends, and the girls in the younger group at the association waved at the camera without letting on that they weren't related to her. María confidently pronounced the first and last names of the men who formed part of her biography—Felipe, Boyer, Aznar— and who would never know a thing about the seventy-year-old woman who had left a half-built neighborhood in a city in southern Spain for working-class Carabanchel, Madrid. One of Zapatero's ministers had granted the association a prize, but María didn't pick it up. They'd given them out in the morning, and she couldn't get the time off work.

From The Wonders by Elena Medel, translated by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Copyright © 2022 by Elena Medel. All rights reserved.