El lunes nos querrán

El lunes nos querrán (On Monday They Will Love Us)

On Monday they’ll love us is a novel that was a most deserved winner of the 2021 Nadal Prize, one of Spain’s most prestigious literary prizes. Its focus is the situation of young Moroccan women and its fluid, dialogic prose hooks the reader from page one.

As a novelist Najat El Hachmi tackles complex, controversial themes in language that is at once accessible and striking, eschewing rhetorical artifice and grandiloquent phrasing. This novel takes the form of a long inner monologue written in the second person, in which the heroine talks to her absent friend.

The heroine is seventeen at the start of the novel. The daughter of a family of Moroccan emigrants (her parents and two younger brothers), she lives with them in a working-class district on the outskirts of Barcelona, in a grey, ugly high-rise block full of tiny flats with low ceilings. The blocks are mainly inhabited by Moroccan emigrant families and is surrounded by industrial estates. Most of the men work as building workers (it’s the era when there was a construction boom in Spain), while their wives live shut up at home, cooking, doing the housework and looking after the children, obsessing with what the neighbours might say… The women are subject to horrendous social pressures…

Tomorrow they’ll love us is a novel that deals with the difficulties faced by adolescent girls in the rigid framework of a Muslim culture dominated by fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran. Written in a direct, but highly literary language, this novel brings original insights to contemporary dilemmas of great interest to English-language readers.

From the reader´s report by Peter Bush