«La península de las casas vacías», the literary boom by David Uclés

With 17 editions in one year and more than 100,000 copies sold, La península de las casas vacías, which has been defined as a novel about the Spanish Civil War in the key of magical realism, has received the Cálamo 2024 Prize, the Andalucía de la Crítica 2025 Prize and has been nominated by Spain for the European Union Prize for Literature. The Irish hispanist Ian Gibson has stated that ‘no contemporary novel has moved him as much as La península de las casas vacías (The Peninsula of empty houses). 

The result of fifteen years of work, an exhaustive process of documentation and trips to a good number of real settings of the conflict, in the novel forty members of a family intertwine with real characters, with magical realism as a narrative vehicle.

David Uclés (Úbeda, Jaén, 1990) is a writer, musician, illustrator and translator (BA and MA in Translation and Interpreting for French, German and English). He has previously published the novels Emilio y Octubre (Dos Bigotes) and El llanto del león (Premio Complutense de Literatura).