Los besos en el pan by Almudena Grandes: Anti-conformism in the face of precarity through a populist reading

The ubiquity of populist discourse in politics and across various sectors of contemporary Spanish society prompts an inquiry into the use of populism in current literature. Almudena Grandes’s polyphonic novel Los besos en el pan ( Kissing the Bread ) (2015) offers a snapshot of the housing crisis in an ordinary neighbourhood of Madrid. This article will analyse the novel’s discursive strategies in order to identify the defining features of what could be considered the use of populist techniques within it. It will also assess whether these techniques serve an anti-hegemonic function of denunciation or whether the populist discourse may, in some way, have become embedded in the narrative as a form of acquiescence to the new political normal.