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Dogs of Summer: A Novel Audiobook
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Publisher Description
My Brilliant Friend meets Blue is the Warmest Color in this lyrical debut novel set in a working-class neighborhood of the Canary Islands—a story about two girls coming of age in the early aughts and a friendship that simmers into erotic desire over the course of one hot summer.
High near the volcano of northern Tenerife, an endless ceiling of cloud cover traps the working class in an abject, oppressive heat. Far away from the island’s posh resorts, two girls dream of hitching a ride down to the beach and escaping their horizonless town.
It’s summer, 2005, and the ten-year-old protagonist is consumed by thoughts of her best friend Isora. Isora is rude and bossy, but she’s also vivacious and brave; grownups prefer her, and boys do, too. That’s why sometimes she gets jealous of Isora, who already has hair on her vagina and soft, round breasts.
But she’s definitely not jealous that Isora’s mother is dead, nor that Isora’s fat, foul-mouthed grandmother has her on a diet, so that she is constantly sticking her fingers down her throat. Besides, she would do anything for Isora: gorge herself on cakes when her friend wants to watch, follow her to the bathroom when she takes a shit, log into chat rooms to swap dirty instant messages with strangers. But she is increasingly finding it hard to keep up with Isora, who seems to be growing up at full tilt without her. And as her submissiveness veers into a painful sexual awakening, desire grows indistinguishable from intimate violence.
Braiding prose poetry with bachata lyrics and the gritty humor of Canary dialect, Dogs of Summer is a story of exquisite yearning, a brutal picture of girlhood, and a love song written for the vital community it portrays.
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“Abreu ingeniously picks apart the submissive narrator’s conflicting feelings of resentment, admiration, and sexual curiosity, and reveals the way these emotions quickly turn devastating…Abreu’s exhilarating chronicle of a young friendship is not to be missed.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Quotes
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“[This] firecracker of a debut…in Julia Sanches’s sparkling translation, is a revelation, perfectly capturing a festering summer of meltdowns and shrinking horizons."
— New York Times -
“Gritty, wild, poetic.”
— BookRiot -
“Dogs of Summer does a good job unnerving a reader in any language; it’s about girls navigating the complexities of being on the cusp of puberty as their bodies become increasingly more unrecognizable to them.”
— Shondaland -
“Offers brave and unvarnished renderings of complicated female friendships, painful sexual awakenings, and gritty dialects…as vivid as anything being written today.”
— Booklist -
“This translation from Spanish by Sanches retains the slang and idioms of the neighborhood dialect, enhancing the well-grounded sense of place.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“A searing, brutal shot of life.”
— Gabriella Burnham, author of It is Wood, It is Stone -
“It is pure poetry. A book that carries you and makes you feel a place.”
— Pilar Quintana, author of The Bitch
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review pick of Best Books Now in Paperback
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About Andrea Abreu
Andrea Abreu was born in 1995 in Tenerife, Spain. In 2021, Granta named her one of the best Spanish writers under the age of thirty-five. Dogs of Summer, her debut novel, was translated into sixteen languages and adapted for the screen by El Estudio.