"A brilliantly inventive writer" - A.S. Byatt
"Not just a Basque novelist but the Basque novelist" - Michael Eaude, 'Guardian'
"Atxaga knows how to entertain, to move, and to give the autobiography all the charm of fiction" - Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas, 'Vanguardia'
"A poetic and rhythmic accumulation of stories and reflections, experiences and emotions" - Antonio Lozano, 'Qué-leer'
A seductive blend of fiction and memoir set in America’s “Silver State” by the pre-eminent Basque writer.
Nevada Days is a fictionalised account of Atxaga’s nine months’ stay as writer-in-residence at the Centre for Basque Studies at the University of Nevad, where his wife, Ángela, is doing research into Basque emigrants, where they are accompanied by their two daughters. But it is also much more. In this fascinating narrative the immediate moment is interspersed with accounts from his memories, images, dreams and reminiscences; and the hostile, arid desert landscape and the green, red and fuschia horizon, coloured by the Reno casinos their fabric of glittering lights, continually leading the narrator – and the reader – back to that other, more private, more personal landscape of the Basque Country.
Bernardo Atxaga seductively weaves together past and present, and shows us how deeply marked we are by experience and history and relationships, however fleeting or enduring, and reminds us what a very strange thing life is.