A coastline of skyscrapers and neon palm trees. Casinos that never close. Russians looking for hedonism and leathery Brits randy for sun. Tattoos. Gangsters. Vomit. Corpses in the sea. 

Insert into this scene a corrupt cop wearing a crochet bikini top and you have Esther García Llovet’s Benidorm noir. It’s a bit seedy, a bit hard-boiled, a bit pulpy, and you can just about detect the influence of the great Chilean postmodernist Roberto Bolaño. But it comes out more like the ITV sitcom Benidorm — if it was given a gritty makeover and a bad girl heroine. 

García Llovet, the 61-year-old author from Madrid, casts an affectionate eye over the “cheap culture” of the Costa Blanca resort, where Manchester United fans drink beer for breakfastunder a sky “the colour of Fanta”. Michela McKay is a chain-smoking, vermouth-swilling Policía Nacional officer on a quest for a Dunhill cigarette lighter that once belonged to Reggie Kray. She wants to give it back to her estranged father, Kyle, once an English professor of history, who met her Spanish mother when he came to Benidorm to write a book about gangsters. The trail eventually leads her to some gloomy Russians whom she tries blackmailing by tasering and drugging their right-hand man then dumping him on a boat at sea along with two kilos of cooked ham and a dozen oranges.

Declan Burke in the Irish Times: “Esther García Llovet’s Spanish Beauty introduces Michela McKay, a Benidorm-based detective of flexible morality and glaring want of vocation (“Michela doesn’t like people who call the police”). This is perhaps unsurprisingly given that she’s the daughter of a Spanish flamenco dancer who abandoned her at a young age, and an English professor of modern history whose failed opus was and ambitious affair: “The Seven Crowns: a comparative study of Shakespeare’s regicide plays and the London underworld gangs of the fifties”.

These days, Michela is battling a Russian invasion of Benidorm, a city that inspires our cynical heroine to wax lyrical: “Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of vomit, pissing against walls and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. Chlamydia. And the sea.”

The McGuffin here is Regie Kray’s cigarette lighter, which the Russians have and Michela, for what passes for sentimental reasons, wants. A bracing fever-dream pulsing to the rhythms of the rotting heart of the Costa Blanca, Spanish Beauty reads like Raymond Chandler purging himself in the depths of a gin hangover.”

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Sam Jones writes “Despite spending the summers of her youth in Fuengirola, watching the foreign tourists at play and devouring the English-language paperbacks she found in a little bookshop in the Andalucían town, nothing could prepare Esther García Llovet for the spectacular unreality of the place that inspired her noir novel Spanish Beauty.

“Benidorm is something of a myth in Spain – and a myth that no one goes to because there’s this stigma that Benidorm is the worst place in Spain,” says the writer.

But on a working visit to the famous Costa Blanca resort a few years ago, she fell in love with its skyscrapers, its peculiarities and even its sky, which, as she writes in the book, is “the colour of Fanta”.

“It’s not that it’s nothing like Spain; it’s that it’s not like anything else,” says García Llovet. “It looked to me like the future and it looked totally out of place – and that made it very attractive.”

Spanish Beauty, which was published in English last week and which is being developed as a film, follows Michela McKay, a cynical, vermouth-downing and dazzlingly corrupt Policía Nacional officer as she trawls Benidorm for her missing British father and for a Dunhill cigarette lighter that once belonged to the British gangster Reggie Kray.”

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Irish Times critic Declan O'Driscoll writes “A more thoroughgoing account of a historical era's devastating impact on an overlooked society is explored in Samahani by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, translated by Mayada Ibrahim and Adil Babikir (Foundry Editions, 216pp, £12.99) Here, the wish for power, control and wealth - with all the allied abuse this necessitates - is passed from Portuguese colonisers to Omani invaders and British imperialists. Central to the novel is the reign of Sultan Suleiman bin Salim who allied himself with the man nicknamed Tippu Tip, one of the most brutal of slave traders. The "skin-burning, flogging and solitary confinement" that they practice leads to a rebellion during which the Sultan's daughter is captured and brought to a village with her eunuch slave, Sondus. The surprising relationship that had already begun to develop between them flourishes in this setting. Presumptuous British forces are next to take over the territory, freeing slaves but creating new forms of exploitative structures. What is less expected is how the general mess of history becomes shockingly specific at the denouement of this finely structured, fascinating novel.”

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Jeremy Black writes “A gritty account of a modern Spain set in Benidorm, this introduces the hard-drinking Michaela McKay, a dubious officer in the Spanish National Police with a British background, who “doesn’t like people who call the police” and is out to get hold of Reggie Kray’s Dunhill lighter and, with it, keen to understand her father Kyle. To that end, the use of intimidated and manipulated criminals is par for the course. Benidorm is a dystopia where “after the fireworks, the sulphurous smell of hell is all that’s left.” A very well-written and disconcerting book, that is short, elusive and genre breaking, all set beneath “clouds scattered strangely like spelling mistakes.””

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Maddy Fletcher writes “The covers are so pretty, nothing else really matters. Actually, the books are very good too, plus there’s a subscription option.”

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As a boy growing up in Sudan, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin stole a book of horror stories by Edgar Allan Poe from under his brother's pillow. Those stories made him want to be a writer. But under the government of President Omar El-Bashir, being a writer was a dangerous business. Baraka faced detention and harassment and though he went on to win major literary prizes, he also earned the unwanted title of Sudan's first-ever banned writer.

Listen to the full interview here

“The novel, delivered to us in Mayada Ibrahim and Adil Babikir’s elegant English translation, stands as a gripping testament to the dream of liberation and love in the era of slavery’s dusk,” writes critic Alex Tan.

Read the full review by clicking here:

'Constantia Soteriou’s Brandy Sour tells guests’ stories in a slim, experimental novel whose flavours bounce off the page and straight into the mouth.'

Times Literary Supplement reviews Brandy Sour

FAR Author, Rosa Ribas, talks to The Guardian about the inspiration her Noir tale.

Foundry Editions founder, Richard Village, is interviewed by Harry Edmundson from the wonderful Sevenoaks Bookshop. He discusses how and why he got into publishing, our books as well as a bit about some of his favourite literature.

The launch of Your Little Matter at the Italian Cultural Institute in London.

It’s a startling moment: mother and daughter have become entwined. Who is speaking here, I ask, is she imagining Lucia’s voice? “When I started out on this journey, I didn’t know who I was going to meet,” she says. “And the more I got to know her, the more I became fond of her. She never got to my age. She’s still so young. She’s just a girl. And in the end I adopted her. Now I’ve got another daughter.”

We’re thrilled to share this glowing review from the Cyprus Sunday Mail for Brandy Sour! Dive into the captivating narratives set in the historic Ledra Palace Hotel, where every page is infused with the essence of Cyprus. Early June can’t come soon enough!

Congratulations Antonella and Maria Grazia!

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