The sleeping world

the long version

"A deeply moving debut novel set amidst the protests, punk music, and rebellious art of 1970s Spain, about a university student searching for her missing younger brother, willing to do anything--and sacrifice anyone--to find him. Spain, 1977. Military rule is over. Bootleg punk music oozes out of illegal basement bars and fascists fight anarchists for political control. Students perform protest art in the city center, rioting against the old government, the undecided new order, against the university, against themselves ... Mosca is an intelligent, disillusioned university student, whose younger brother is among the "disappeared," kidnapped by the police, missing for two years, and presumed dead. Spurred by the turmoil around them, Mosca and her friends commit an act that carries their rebellion too far and sends them spiraling out of their provincial hometown. But the further they go, the more Mosca believes her brother is alive and the more she is willing to do anything to find him. In the tradition of Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers and Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes' debut The Sleeping World is a beautiful, daring novel about youth, freedom, and doing whatever it takes to keep a family together, in a nation whose dead walk the streets and whose wars never end"-- "An incisive debut novel set in 70s Spain after the death of dictator Francisco Franco--amidst riots, protests, and uprising as the suppressed country awakens to freedom--about a young woman desperately searching for her brother, willing to risk everything and everyone around her to find him"--