Rights sold
- Rey Naranjo Editores (Columbia)
- Actes Sud (France)
- Wallstein Verlag (Germany)
- Dar al Saqi (Lebanon)
- DoppelHouse Press (United States of America)
Read a sample translation of Malva.
About the book
Malva is the daughter of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. She was born with hydrocephalus and soon disowned by her father. She lived in a foster family in the Netherlands and died during the Second World War at the age of eight.
Hagar Peeters has Malva, after her dead, pick up the pen that her father let slip from his hand when he died. She gives the girl a voice, and a fascinating life in which she meets kindred spirits with whom, as wise as she is witty, she comments on life on earth.
Along with them, Malva tries to find an answer to the question of how it came about that Neruda, the irreproachable hero who stood up for the forgotten and downtrodden, denied the existence of his own daughter. She asks Hagar Peeters, whose father was a journalist in Chile when Neruda died, to be her ghost writer.