Biography
Xosé Monteagudo works for the Inland Revenue and writes novels in which intrigue is mixed with underhand dealings, and voices arrive from the past to reconstruct a story. He is the author of five novels to date: The Voices of the News (2002), This Story (2006), A Smart Guy (2009), The Curious World of Normal People (2012) and Everything We Were (2016). The Voices of the News and A Smart Guy were awarded two of the three main Galician fiction prizes: the Blanco Amor and the García Barros. Everything We Were is considered a milestone in modern Galician literature and has impressed readers and critics alike, being awarded the San Clemente Prize (the only literary prize in Galicia to be adjudged by high-school pupils) and the Gala do Libro Prize.
Synopsis
Everything We Were (534 pages) is divided into six parts, and is narrated by a range of voices, including a schoolteacher, a detective fiction writer, an orphan girl, a Galician emigrant in Argentina and a historian.
Sample
My mother’s last letter arrived three months after her death. When I opened the postbox and collected the day’s mail, among all the letters from the bank and the advertising leaflets, I was surprised to see an envelope with my address printed in block letters. I read the opening sentence (that unusual and unsettling “Dear Son”) and turned the handwritten page over. I confirmed that the message ended with the nervous, Gothic features of my mother’s signature, picked up the envelope again and searched for a return address, but there wasn’t one.
To begin with, I calculated she must have posted the letter shortly before dying and the letter had been sitting in post offices for the last three months, but when I paid attention to the postmark, I realized the letter had suffered no delay between being deposited in a postbox in Pontevedra and reaching my hands in London. At this point, I started to think that the paper I held in front of me was a posthumous act with which my mother intended to interfere in my life.
Portico of Galician Literature 