Lucía Solla Sobral, the literary phenomenon selling 630 copies a day
The Galician writer debuts and triumphs for Sant Jordi with the novel about psychological violence 'You will eat flowers'
BarcelonaEight months ago, all this was unthinkable: publishing a novel, having readers, having so many readers that it has been on the bestseller list in the country for 34 weeks, discovering Sant Jordi and doing so as a published writer. Two months ago, Lucía Solla Sobral (Marín, Pontevedra, 1989) took a leave of absence from her job at a technology start-up because the unexpected success of Comerás flores (Libros del Asteroide) has meant she can only sleep at home two or three days a week. Working in hotels in her spare time was already unsustainable. The day after Sant Jordi, she took a flight back to Oviedo, where she lives, and this Saturday, heading to Argentina.
The manuscript for Comerás flores arrived by email at Asteroide at the beginning of 2025. It had no patrons, only a four-line endorsement from the writer Marta Jiménez Serrano, who had been her teacher in a writing workshop and recommended that the editor Luis Solano pay attention to the author. Solano did not hesitate to acquire that impeccable original, without even meeting the writer face to face. "I was prepared for nothing to happen at all –admits Solla–. And once the publisher had read it and liked it, I was convinced that the most normal thing would be to go unnoticed. I live in surprise and completely dissociated! I also thought I would never live off this, and look, I'm a little closer now..."
"No one could have imagined what has happened –they say at Asteroide–. We liked the book and were sure it would be liked, but you never know how many people. We quickly saw that word of mouth was working and that recommendations on social media and in book clubs meant it reached wider audiences. It was the readers themselves who launched it." Comerás flores has reached Sant Jordi in top form, with 22 editions and 150,000 copies sold: that's 630 copies a day in Spain alone. A debut author has reached third place in the Spanish-language fiction ranking for Sant Jordi, behind two titans like Eduardo Mendoza and Fernando Aramburu. It began to be distributed in Latin America about a month ago, and translation rights have been purchased for fourteen languages.
Lyricism versus aggressiveness
The key to the success of Comerás flores is both the theme it addresses and a singular, lyrical literary voice, which uses beauty to speak of the darkness of psychological violence. Solla, a reader of poetry and theater, believes that this poetic style "compensates for the harshness of the scenes, makes it more portable and at the same time also accentuates the aggressiveness." The protagonist is Marina, a girl who has just graduated and lost her father. At this moment of vulnerability, she falls in love with a man twenty years older than her who fills her with gifts and flowers and, in an increasingly less subtle way, also steals her voice, her friends, her appetite, and her hope. "There are many readers who identify with Marina or her friend Diana, many more than we can imagine. It is very necessary that we talk about psychological abuse and not just about murdered women," says the writer. For the editors, the basis of the phenomenon "is a literary novel that is very well constructed, with nuanced characters, not at all Manichean, which can appeal to both the very literary reader and the one who is not," and the fact that it touches on a little-explored theme in literature but present in romantic relationships, such as abuse without physical violence, is added.
"There is a lot of talent and skill to make the reader be by Marina's side while everything that happens to her happens," they say of Asteroide. The identification with the characters has been evident in presentations and reading clubs, in messages and comments made to Solla by hundreds of women who consider themselves survivors of abusive relationships. They were the trigger for sales of Comerás flores. "We have all been Marina or we know a Marina. Being able to identify with a normal girl, who has studies and feminist references, helps, because normally isolated and uneducated victims are depicted," affirms the author, with the perspective of the months.
Landing in the sector
Days like Sant Jordi, full of authors with long careers and writers with ties to the publishing sector, make Solla still feel alien to this whole world. "They treat me with a lot of affection, but I still don't feel like I'm part of the sector. I don't know if it will be with the next novel, I don't know if I'm on probation because it's the first hit and we have to see the next ones...", she points out. The dazzling and unexpected success usually comes with some reservations: "When the novel becomes mainstream, suddenly it's looked at with other eyes and it seems that, rather than literature, there's marketing. And I don't think so: it's the power of recommendation and of gifting books", she affirms, aware that every detail adds up in the astral conjunction: the title, the publisher, and a striking yellow cover.
In less than a year, Lucía Solla Sobral already has: a book, 150,000 copies sold, her first Sant Jordi, dozens of trips, and a second novel she has begun to stitch together. A new life.
