"Ms. Rosa scurries between the tables in the café, bumping into customers with her imposing thighs. 'Damn it! Damn you!' she often mutters. Her world is the café; the rest of the universe is its periphery."

One by one, women and men who are outside Ms. Rosa's universe enter her world: Troubled women and troubled men talk to and from each other. They bring with them their pain, their hopes, their love and the lives each of them is attached to. The Beehive fills with their world. Thus Ms. Rosa's café in Madrid becomes "a world" not only for her, but for more than three hundred characters - and for the readers of this novel.

The Beehive, the most competent example of the grotesque realism of Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela, who is considered "the most important Spanish writer after Cervantes" in his country, is translated from the Spanish original by Gökhan Aksay...

"The Beehive is one of the undisputed cornerstones of Spanish literature." El Pais