Fists

'Boxing', 'Horses' and 'The Monkey': three powerful coming-of-age stories about boys confronting reality, and fighting to stay alive in a man's world. In 'Fists', a teenage amateur boxer steps into the ring for the first time, and finds himself in a face-off with Life in all its muscular force; in 'Horses', two brothers embark on their first forays into adulthood, each learning to play a man's game in his own painful way; and in 'The Monkey', a young man realizes that in order to stay sane and survive in this world, we have to sacrifice our childhood dreams. Published by Pushkin Press, Howard Curtis's translation of Fists won the 2010 Premio Campiello Europa, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.