Gibraltarian author M. G. Sanchez has just published LOWLIFE TALES, his first major volume in nearly three and a half years. Available in both paperback and kindle format, the book has appeared in a Llanito dialogue version and, on the 30th December, will come out  in a version aimed at English readers. Featuring 11 stories and running to around 380 pages, the collection returns to many of the themes and ideas explored in Sanchez’s previous writings. Criminals, charlatans, drunkards, smugglers, loners, dropouts, bullies, sycophants, and ordinary people striving to live their lives as best as they can all appear in the book’s pages.

Explains Dr Sanchez: “I’ve always been interested in uncovering voices that often go unheard, and in preserving stories that are usually overlooked. I have no interest in squeaky-clean, sanitised accounts of the past, the ones that insist we are “punching above our weight” and all that self-congratulatory business. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida once said, “[w]hat cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.” I have long subscribed to that view, convinced that what is left unsaid often reveals more about a place than the selective soundbites parroted by the custodians of official memory.”

A particular concern for the author was to keep the book faithful to historical detail, evoking in this way the atmosphere and street-by-street layout of Gibraltar in the 1990s. ‘At times,’ Dr Sanchez tells YGTV, ‘it almost felt as if I were putting together a guidebook to the city of that decade — not a conventional one with maps and directions, of course, but a record of lived experiences and everyday encounters in places which, though still present today, have undergone significant transformation.’

The collection also includes a few stories set in the present day and in a hypothetical near-future.

Sanchez’s writings about Gibraltar continue to attract international interest. In the last few weeks a long article on his work was published in the Italian journal Margini, and the author also recently took part in a two-day online event organised by the Central University of Gujarat in India.

More details about the new book can be found on this Amazon link:

https://amzn.to/49YBHx3