Javier Cercas

A young journalist, by chance, comes across a fascinating and very significant history of the Spanish Civil War, and aims to rebuild it. When the Republican troops withdraw to the French border, the way of exile, in the disorder of the disbandade someone makes the decision to shoot a group of Franco prisoners. Among them is Rafael Sanchez-Mazas, founder and ideologist of Falange, perhaps one of the direct leaders of the fratricidal conflict.

This book is a chronic test or a test-form chronicle. This book is not a fiction. This book is the anatomy of a moment: the instant in which Adolfo Suárez sat on the afternoon of February 23, 1981, while the bullets of the coup courts were buzzing around him in the Chamber of the Congress of Deputies and all the other parliamentarians - all but two: General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo - sought refuge under their seats. This book is the chronicle of that gesture and the chronicle of a coup and the chronicle of a few decisive years in the history of Spain. This book is an ineligible book. A single book.

In the summer of 1978, when Spain has not yet left Franco and does not end up entering democracy and social and moral borders seem more porous than ever before, a teenager named Ignacio Cañas by chance knows the Zarco and Tere, two criminals of his age, an encounter that will change his life forever. Thirty years later, a writer is commissioned to write a book on the Zarco, which by then became a myth of the juvenile crime of the Transition, but what the writer finally finds is not the concrete truth of the Zarco, but an unexpected and universal truth, which concerns us all. Thus, through a story that does not grant an instant of truce, hiding its extraordinary complexity under a transparent surface, the novel becomes a passionate inquiry into the limits of our freedom, the inscrutable motivations of our acts and the inasible nature of truth. It also confirms Javier Cercas as one of the indispensable figures of contemporary European narrative.

A terrible crime shakes the peaceful region of the Terra Alta: the owners of their largest company, Gráfica Adell, appear killed after having been subjected to heinous torture. He is in charge of the Melchor Marín case, a young police and voracious reader who came from Barcelona four years ago, with a dark past that has made him a legend of the body and who believes he has buried under his happy life as the husband of the people's librarian and father of a girl named Cosette, as well as the daughter of Jean Valjean, the protagonist of his favorite novel: The Miserable.

How to face those who handle power in the shadows? How to take revenge on those who hurt you most? Melchor Marin comes back. And he returns to Barcelona, where he is claimed to investigate a glare case: they are blackmailing the city's mayor with a sexual video. Carried with his regret for not having found his mother's killers, but also with his inflexible sense of justice and his rocky moral integrity, Melchor must dismount an extortion that is not known to pursue the simple economic benefit or political destabilization, and to do so, he enters into the circles of power, a place where cynicism, unscrupulous ambition and corrupt brutality reign. Over there, this absorbing and wild novel, populated by a pleade of memorable characters, becomes a demolishing portrait of the political-economic elite of Barcelona, but above all in a furious argument against the tyranny of the owners of money and the masters of the world.

Eva García Sáenz de Urturi combines mythology, suspension and love with its unmistakable style.