Bruno Blog

My blog’s recommendation this week is for a useful, effective, and easy book. I have been trying to listen to myself more for a long time, to make my day to day life more conscious, and one of the people who has helped me to achieve this is Anna Sólyom, friend, author and body therapist.

RBA has bet on her book entitled RECONNECT WITH YOUR BODY where Anna gives you guidelines to listen to your body’s signals, which are very clear indicators of what is happening to you and what you are experiencing. Everything you experience, think and feel is manifested in your body in the form of pain, stiffness, cramps and blockages, or a general feeling of fatigue. Which of you has not had any of these symptoms at some time? Do you know how to interpret them? If you learn to read these signs that your body sends you, you will discover the most powerful instrument to free yourself from everything that overloads you. Your body will be a map that reveals both the problem and the solution. As Francesc Miralles says in the book’s epilogue: Your body is your true home and we spend half our lives turning our backs on it, we consider it a mere container. To avoid it, Anna teaches you through simple guidelines how to take care of it and how by listening to it you can fix those discomforts that we carry as routine and that in the end have a logical explanation just by looking inside. This is a book to recover the corporal conscience and with it the reconnection with your body. All our emotions are reflected in the body and Anna presents it to us in this book in a clear way so that we can all apply it in our daily life. A book for all of those who want to take care of themselves, who want to discover and reconnect with themselves. It does not cost anything to try it, so I encourage everyone to read and try it, it will not leave you indifferent.

Thank you, Anna, for this book that is a break from all the hustle and bustle.

This week we should be in Frankfurt, but because of the Covid-19 pandemic we have not been able to travel and the fair must be virtual.  It is not the same, but it still has positive things, because all in life has a positive side. However, one of the things that this pandemic is teaching me is to value the things that I want and have, because when you do not have them you miss them. So, we must give value to what sometimes, out of pure routine, we do not value, and now, for me, memories are a brutal avalanche of emotions. I remember moments, places, and people, and my heart starts racing. I am moved by many things and it seems that I feel in a stronger way, although I always thought that I already was a person who feels too much, just like the protagonist of the new novel by Ana Alcolea, EL BRINDIS DE MARGARITA, published by Harper Collins. 

Margarita returns to her hometown to empty her parents’s house, a 1960s apartment in a working-class neighbourhood. In the meantime, the media is filled up with the exhumation of Franco’s body, which marked the lives of so many generations of the Spanish people. Of the four people who lived in that house, only Margarita remains. Her grandmother, her mother and her father have died in this order. She is an only child and is now left to do all the tasks on her own. Neither her husband nor her son accompanies her on this extreme journey, which is one of personal gain.

The smells that come from the clothes, the taste of the older drinks, the old passports, the books…  will transport her to different moments of her past life in the flat. Her own blame and the ghosts of the past that live in her memory are mixed with the history that marks her family’s life: a grandmother that lived all the wars of the century, a mother and a father that grew up in a post-war country that castrated their dreams; and herself, the protagonist and narrator in the first person, who was thirteen when the dictator died. Her memories fill the empty house, and through them, we can understand the attitudes of her family and herself with all that was happening in those years of the Transition in a better way. A novel full of nostalgia but at the same time a hard one, full of love and sorrow, a novel with feelings that give you goose bumps. The trademark of the novel is clearly one of the great times of Spain’s recent history: The Transition. But the most important thing is to get to know Margarita and her family, to see how they lived, how they sat and how they wrote their lives, which were not easy. But it is even more important to never give up living, right?

Everyone who has read Ana, knows that she has true passion for writing, that she is pleasant, and that her demands are huge. She has written for children, for young people and for her first time she is writing for adults, even though she has overcome the difficult test, because the smallest fans are always the ones who demand the most, entering the adult world is always a challenge, and Ana has done it in an amazing way, because she has been able to gift with these characters that feel, that create emotions to the public, achieving that the story itself becomes more important than the historical mark, which is shown in a very well narrated and documented way, but what remains in the reader are these smells, these memories of a time that has been the time of many citizens in Spain. Thank you Ana for not having written just any other novel, for having written with soul. Not all novels have soul, and that is the complicated part of writing, and here, Ana excels.

For those of us who have always liked books, I am almost sure that we have read THE FAMOUS FIVE, THE TWINS AT ST.CLARE’S, PUK or the entire TINTÍN collection. These books, even today, are still alive, and the new generations are hooked on them, so I wonder if there is a magic formula to make them timely. I do not have the answer, if I did, the publishing world would lose all its magic. However, what I am sure of is that the formulas of these publishing phenomena are replicated, modernized and that they work again. It is true that fashions change, and sometimes the most realistic books have been left in the background to give way to fantasy and dystopian worlds, but I think that those novels, with which children can identify themselves with, have something that engages them. As is the case with STRANGER THAN LOVE, published by Edebé, and signed by Francesc Miralles, an author who knows how to connect with the younger audiences, despite the fact that his recent successes have been in non-fiction books for adults. Francesc has always had a space for the youngest public and by winning the Gran Angular prize with A HAIKU FOR ALICE he opened a path among the youngest that he finished off with his work RETRUM, a super-seller, among many other works, because he has always bet on literature for the younger readers when many were treating it as second division. Therefore, I am delighted that a publisher like Edebé has published STRANGER THAN LOVE, a novel that recovers the value of friendship, the summer camps with friends, the discovery of love, to know how important it is to fit in or not in today’s society, and the adventures, paying tribute to one of the series of the Netflix platform that has been most successful among teenagers and adults, STRANGER THINGS. With that retro touch that made those of our generation fall in love with it, and also fans of the Goonies, the series managed to be a leader among all audiences and cultivate the fan phenomenon, something that Miralles already achieved with RETRUM, making a tribute to the Gothic world. I hope that a new success awaits for him with this beautiful novel, where the protagonist Nemrod knows what it is like to feel different and takes refuge in his room, a museum dedicated to his favorite series. But when he learns that there is a themed camp called Strange Camp, he doesn’t hesitate to do anything he can to raise the money to go there that summer. Overcoming his fears, he will find the beginning of many things and will have to face something stranger than a Monster. I am sure that Miralles will not disappoint you with this novel that I read in only one weekend and that left me with an amazing feeling in my heart. In short, it is a powerful story for young audiences of 12 years old and older.

The month of October begins and with it we start to dress with a jacket and boots from one day to another. We have overcome summer and we are entering this autumn, which most predict as cursed. October is the month of the Frankfurt Fair, the queen of book fairs, and this year we will have to celebrate it from distance, as we have done with almost everything. I confess that it is a fair that I have never liked, but after attending for 27 years I have known how to find the positive parts of it, the main one being the contact with the publishers, many already friends, from all over the world. It is true that technology makes it easier and easier for us to be in permanent contact with those who are farther away. Now a screen can show us the smiles and looks of people but deprives us of many other things, such as human contact, hugs, handshakes … in short, the proximity of the face to face. At the moment, we cannot achieve this through a computer, although I don’t really want it to be like that either, because in the end we would end up being more like robots than people. I hope that this is a transitional situation and that next year we can go to the fair and hug, kiss and cuddle each other again, because the essential part of business, from my point of view, is that human part. And now that a virus wants to take this essence away from us, for me the idea that these intangibles are the most important thing becomes stronger and nothing and nobody should take them away from us.

So this special year, the year of Covid19, in the agency we wanted to make a different catalog, a visual one with a clear motto: CULTURE IS SAFE. The books protect and save us, as does the famous mask today. There are masks of all models and colors, but ours is one of the most beautiful ones that exist and you can see it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmmW_aObf_M. In my opinion, books have survived everything, wars and pandemics, and this time they will do it again. We must be the first to not stop doing what we love the most, which is reading, and in that way, we will be able to feed the world with good stories.

Here we leave you our catalog: http://www.sandrabruna.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/FrankfurtRightsCatalogue_SandraBruna2020-Final-2.pdf. Together with this video full of virtual hugs and kisses, which I hope to be able to give you in person very soon. To all the editors that I will see on screen very soon, and to all the readers of this blog, to whom I thank for following us, I want to dedicate our most recent news, among which, surely you will find the book that can accompany you to face this autumn, an autumn that does not present itself as an  easy one, but we can still have many beautiful things and many unforgettable moments in it, some of them accompanied by a good book.

To finish, we would love that this campaign we have initiated for this so special fair of Frankfurt2020 called #MYMASKISABOOK, becomes viral. I hope that after seeing our video you will encourage yourself to share your photos with the best mask of this new season and that you will send them to us through our social networks (Twitter, Instagram and Facebook), tagging us so that we can make a global tribute to the books that have always helped us, in good and bad times, and through that campaign we will support culture, because without culture there is no future and as I always say BOOKS ARE LIFE, so don’t take them away from us.

Autumn has come. This autumn, like spring and summer, is rare and atypical, but it comes loaded with fear, since almost the majority of humanity fears him, because for months we have been hearing that it will be the most horrible autumn in history. Poor autumn, it seems that nobody wants it to arrive, that nobody expects it, but the reality is that it has arrived. There is no one capable to stop time, not even the damn virus, so I thought that the best alternative I have would be to go live in a parallel fantasy world. Just like the main character of the book by Sacha Azcona, SPLENDIDA, who decides to flee to a fantasy world to avoid being next to her horrible aunt Evilia. In this new world she will live an exciting adventure with some very special friends like the Giant of vegetables, Magical trees, the Tooth fairy and even the Bogeyman. However, Splendida is not afraid of anything, and together with his friends they will defeat the terrible Monsieur LeChug, who boycotted farmers so that vegetables were bad and no child in the world would like them. Splendida will return to London and will have the recognition she deserves, although it won’t last for long, since almost nobody believes that a girl with four fantastic beings can discover the tricks of LeChug, but Splendida learns, grows and loves the books that she shares with others in order to make them happy. She knows what she has lived and when she is in the forest she always feels the magic again when she is caressing the trunks of the trees.
 
A beautiful story, where magic and vegetables are put together in a perfect cocktail of adventures in a book that brings values without falling into morality or boredom.