At the Pontas Agency we are pleased to announce Ferran Guallar’s debut novel, The Wild Within (La Part Salvatge). It will be published in its original Catalan with Empúries and translated into Spanish with Navona on October 10th. World English rights are currently on offer and there is a full English translation done by two translators in close consultation with the author. All other translation and audiovisual rights are also available.
In this thought-provoking portrait of masculinity and corruption, the author strives to examine our least explored side, the one that makes us tremble in the face of the force of nature. The Wild Within is a novel that connects with current and universal concerns: power, environmentalism, gender, and the battle for African resources.
Ferran Guallar has lived in different countries in Africa for 20 years working for the Jane Goodall Institute in a chimpanzee reserve. He founded his delegation in West Africa and later headed a delegation in Spain. The author uses his personal experiences of wildlife conservation and working with the Jane Goodall Institute as a jumping-off point for exploring the darker side of human nature. In his debut, he compares the struggle of a primate to maintain his alpha role with the internal problems of the protagonist to keep his position within the organization he works for.
The Wild Within follows Paul Murray, an anthropologist who specializes in evolution and primates. He is slowly going through a quiet personal decline at a small African site, a paradise for naturalists. Paul has lived through a past filled with violence, and now, fifteen years later, he has moved on and even seems to have found love again.
Without realizing it, his field notes on a chimpanzee that has been recently dethroned as alpha male, uncannily mirror his present moment in life. However, in which he either does not see or does not want to see the new circumstances or the abnormal dynamics within his organization that are slowly suffocating him.
An unexpected event forces him to make a drastic decision to avoid losing everything he has fought to protect: the forest, the chimpanzees and the future of the inhabitants of the little paradise where the underlying irrationality of human beings becomes the new normal.
In The Wild Within, the author holds a mirror up to humanity, looking at animals to see nature being reflected back. In this thought-provoking portrait of masculinity and corruption, the author strives to examine our least explored side, the one that makes us tremble in the face of the force of nature.
For more information, please contact Anna Soler-Pont (anna@pontas-agency.com).