The sales success of Han cantado bingo (Reservoir Books, 2025) confirms something that many readers intuited from the first pages: Lana Corujo's literature excites. That this childhood story has connected with a wide audience is no coincidence; it responds to a living tradition and a way of telling that sinks its roots in island memory and, at the same time, dialogues with great voices of Spanish literature.
At the center of the novel, a loss. From the beginning beats a childhood crossed by affective precariousness and imagination as a form of resistance. In this sense, Corujo is inscribed in a Canarian genealogy that we could consider begins with Nivaria Tejera and reaches Andrea Abreu and other later writers: authors who have turned childhood into a space of revelation, where structural violence and beauty coexist without filters.
As happened with El barranco (1959) by Nivaria Tejera and with the dense atmosphere of Panza de burro (2020) by Andrea Abreu, the landscape in Han cantado bingo is not a simple setting, but a symbolic structure that shapes the childhood experience. The ravine in Tejera is a fissure. Childhood, crossed by war and exile, is inscribed in an abrupt landscape that seems to absorb and return the voices of the past. The donkey's belly in Abreu is a low cloud that oppresses and distorts the perception of the world. Lana Corujo's volcano, for its part, is a seemingly round surface but devastated from behind, a mineral wound that reflects the family fracture. In all three cases, the territory or nature act as an emotional mirror and archive of trauma: island geography does not accompany the story, it determines it.
But the success of Han cantado bingo is also explained by its ability to link that insular tradition with a broader one. In its pages, there are echoes of Carmen Martín Gaite and Ana María Matute: childhood as an ambiguous territory and the presence of the extraordinary infiltrating the everyday. The family gift that allows communication with the deceased sister in Han cantado bingo is not presented as a fantastic artifice by its author, but as a natural extension of grief. The magical does not break reality; it expands it. In that naturalization of the invisible, there is an affinity with the atmosphere of El cuarto de atrás or Retahílas or with the symbolic intensity of Primera memoria.
The novel also dialogues, in a hidden way, with the mythical dimension of the landscape found in Mararía, by Rafael Arozarena. There, the volcanic territory is a determining force; in Han cantado bingo, the volcano called "El Ahorcado" functions as an absolute symbol of a seemingly compact family structure but devastated from within. Like the Bahía de los Ahogados (or Bahía de Ávila) in Arozarena, the landscape becomes a threshold between the living and the dead. The island keeps memory. However, there is a tonal difference: in Mararía, the bay has a more legendary, almost mythical nuance; in Han cantado bingo, the volcano is more linked to intimate trauma and family structure.
The volcano, with its name laden with tragic resonances, condenses the idea of suspension and wound. And the jable—that sand that shifts and never stays fixed—adds another symbolic layer: identity as a moving territory, childhood as unstable ground. Nothing is completely solid in the novel, except the certainty that the landscape shapes those who inhabit it. Is island geography destiny?
Another of the book's great successes, and perhaps one of the keys to its success, is the use of language and popular customs. The references to bingo, to the village festival, the use of its own lexicon, the orality it breathes: all of this builds a recognizable community. The cry of "Bingo!" is a celebration, but it also becomes a metaphor for the chance that governs life. The dynamism and playfulness that the author proposes, with echoes of Cortázar, is an invitation to read with suspicion and complicity.
That a novel so rooted in the local has achieved notable bestseller success is cause for collective celebration. It shows that situated stories, written from the truth of a territory, of our beloved island of Lanzarote, from a concrete memory, can engage readers from anywhere. From here, the congratulations to Lana Corujo are not just for the numbers —although those too— but for having managed to turn a childhood story, with Lanzarote in the background, into a literary event.