Eggplant
by Jose Angel Mañas
Berenguela the Great was queen of Castile for a single day before abdicating in favour of her son Ferdinand III the Saint. Daughter of Alfonso VIII, the victor of Las Navas de Tolosa, and mother of the conqueror of Andalusia. This is how she has gone down in history, but in reality she was the one who achieved the definitive union of Castile and León, the co-ruler of these two kingdoms for thirty years and the one in charge of supplying men and money to her son while he took Córdoba and, in practice, expelled the Muslims from the peninsula.
Her role at a crucial moment makes her the most important queen of Spain after Isabella the Catholic. How is it possible then that we barely know her? Why has she been relegated in history in favour of her father and her son?
These are the questions that José Ángel Mañas answers in this splendid novel with which, after ¡Pelayo! and ¡Fernán González!, he closes his fictional trilogy on the Reconquista.
An essential work that highlights the figure of who was undoubtedly the great lady of the Spanish Middle Ages.
I was born in Madrid in 1971. My literary career began in 1994, when I was a finalist for the Nadal Prize with my first novel, Historias del Kronen. That work, which was selected by the newspaper El Mundo as one of the hundred most important Spanish novels of the 20th century, was a resounding success and became an instant classic: it is considered a faithful portrait of Spanish youth at the end of the century, its adaptation to film won me a Goya as a screenwriter and it was the highest-grossing Spanish film of 1995. Since then, I have not stopped publishing and, with more than thirty titles under my belt, I am still going strong, alternating contemporary novels with historical novels.
My best-known contemporary novels are Historias del Kronen, Mensaka (adapted to film by Salvador García in 1998, Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay), La última juerga (Ateneo de Sevilla Award, 2019) and Una vida de bar en bar (2020). My most important historical novels are Conquistadores de lo imposible (2019), El hispano (2020), ¡Pelayo! (2021), ¡Fernán González! (2022) —both published by La Esfera—, Guerrero (2022) and, now, Berenguela. In both registers, what I try to do is decipher the reality of my country, sometimes looking straight at the present and sometimes delving into the past.
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/berenguela
