Spanish poet Elena Medel's debut novel The Wonders (translated by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead) flows on the thrum of two women's internal lives. Maria and Alicia, a grandmother and granddaughter who have never met, are linked by the vital force that money (and the lack thereof) represents to them, through the two generations that set them apart. As Maria leaves her small-town neighborhood for blue-collar jobs in Madrid, Alicia unwittingly follows in her footsteps in a different timeline, repeating the beats of a life dictated by poverty and working-class womanhood.

The novel's fulcrum lies in the connection between these women's life-journeys and a crucial moment in Spain's feminist history: the 2018 Women's March in Madrid (see Beyond the Book). In the 1970s, after she is abandoned by a man who got her pregnant, Maria arrives in Madrid reeling from her circumstances: the shame ...