Plants Don't Drink Coffee

Unai Elorriaga does away with the boundaries and coordinates of con- ventional literature and takes them elsewhere: to the surprising literary territory of a writer with no hang-ups. —Harkaitz Cano

Short sentences, measured words, dialogues pregnant with silences . . . all can be found in this lively narrative. It is the characters, the stories, and above all, the transparency and gracefulness of the child’s outlook that add freshness and strength to Elorriaga’s latest. —Berria

In these stories there is a psychological process, a learning curve, a pain- ful jump toward crucial knowledge. In Plants Don’t Drink Coffee that jump takes place toward the end, which helps the story glide along joyously, aided by the novel’s two main strengths: the innocent but brilliant, and almost shrewd language of the child narrator and the abundance of secondary stories. —El País

Plants Don’t Drink Coffee must be understood from a double perspective: as an approach to reality from a non-realist position and also as the practice of pure creativity. —El Mundo

This is the last book that made us cry. It made us cry with a wonderful hurt that made us remember what life was like. If you haven’t read Plants Don’t Drink Coffee by Unai Elorriaga you should run out and purchase it, and you should drag it across your eyes. Don’t put it at the bottom of a stack. Don’t make it the caboose of some glorified book-domino train. It’s set in the Basque country of Spain. It contains rugby, and dragon flies, and carpentry competitions, and old love letters looked over. We can’t tell you much else, because it would ruin the tale. Each narrative, in the four narrative split story, is packed with rose-petal scented suspense. —Dark Sky Magazine