There are three bestsellers of Galician literature: The Carpenters Pencil by Manuel Rivas, a love story set in the Spanish Civil War; Winter Letters by Agustín Fernández Paz, about a man who decides to find out if a haunted house is really haunted (this title is also available from Small Stations Press); and perhaps most famously of all Memoirs of a Village Boy by Xosé Neira Vilas. This book, according to Wikipedia, is the most published work of Galician literature and has sold 700,000 copies in the Galician language. Now this work is being made available in an English translation by John Rutherford, founder of the Centre for Galician Studies at Oxford University and translator of Don Quixote and La Regenta for Penguin Classics. The book is a diary kept by Balbino, a village boy, in other words a nobody. In the first chapter, he describes the village as a mixture of mud and smoke, where the dogs howl and the people die "when God sees fit". He would like to see the world, to go over seas and lands he doesnt know. He was born and brought up in the village, but no
