Bruno Blog

Ava Gardner is considered one of the great stars of 20th century Hollywood and Jordi Solé has won the renowned Prudenci Bertrana award with a novel in which she is the protagonist during a filming that took place in Tossa de Mar, a fishing village on the Costa Brava. A full-fledged Women’s Fiction with internationally recognized characters, and an endearing character that takes us by the hand through this story of different loves.

When in 1990 Pol Mas learns that Ava Gardner had died at the age of sixty-seven, he recalls that he met her during the filming of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in Tossa de Mar at the family hotel Àncora. This unforgettable shooting meant for Pol his passage from childhood to youth marked by the lifelong love he developed for the actress.

L’any que vaig estimar l’Ava Gardner (The Year I Loved Ava Gardner) is a delightful, bright story, full of experiences and glamour, with unforgettable characters such as Ava Gardner, Mario Cabré or Frank Sinatra, in an incomparable setting such as the Costa Brava in the fifties.

Having great authors of non-fiction books in the agency always makes you learn new things when one of them publishes a book. Today is about another of the Agency’s great masters, Álex Rovira. After the worldwide phenomenon of The Good Luck, with more than 4 million copies sold, he publishes Your Good Luck Mentality, a method to put into practice in your day-to-day life the principles that inspired this great story.

The book has been on sale for less than ten days, and the publisher has already announced a second edition, because this book is a great little treasure. If The Good Luck inspired so many readers around the world, this new one will help them to apply what they may have missed in the more theoretical part. According to the author: Your life is the result of your mindset. Understanding this simple but powerful premise will open the door to change, so that you can take control of your life. Because if we change our mindset we change our life-script and, consequently, our destiny.

Mentality is the set of beliefs and habits that shape our way of perceiving, interpreting, thinking and judging reality, and the decisions we make. The good news is that mentality can be changed through joyful, fun and surprising learning, to make it original, positive and constructive. Álex Rovira calls this type of mentality “Good Luck Mentality”, and in these pages he tells us how to create it from his experience accompanying thousands of people in this process of vital transformation.

This book is the ideal companion to the international bestseller The Good Luck. Through 30 lessons full of exercises, very inspiring real examples and fables by the author himself, these pages are the tool to change your life. Luck is sought, and does not depend only on chance, we learned that in his first book, but in this new book Alex explains how to change your mindset, so that you stop believing that your luck depends only on chance or that it is only for the fortunate few. We can all change our attitude and have this good luck mentality, so that things flow and go better for us. Excellent book, practical, useful and not too long. We all deserve to be happy and, by reading this book, Álex opens doors and windows to achieve it.

I want to highlight the following sentence from the back cover of this book: “Sometimes we cannot stare reality in the face, so there will be times when this novel will be uncomfortable, but it will be too late to run away”. This is really what has happened to all of us who have read EL CONFIDENT. A novel that hooks you and makes you think that if the story is based on reality, we can start running because living in Barcelona is dangerous. The streets of Barcelona will become the scene of this novel that reads like a true crime, written by a boy of the Criminal Investigation Unit.

A war for control of territory and drug trafficking in Barcelona between different criminal groups during 2016 and 2017 brought blood to the streets and filled the headlines of the press at the time. With shootouts and hired hitmen acting in a scenario of violence and power where drugs played an important role.

This reality has been the source of inspiration to write the novel that I have in my hands now. Those facts have allowed the author to create the perfect environment to explain a story of revenge, and that was born from facts as real as those that happened in our house. EL CONFIDENT is a choral novel starring several characters who, united by a past marked by pain and resentment, one day had to choose between their lives or to settle accounts: Emilio, an ex-military of the Colombian FARC with a truculent past; Raül, a father who cannot forget his son, and Esmeralda, a Colombian girl victim of the internal drug trafficking war and now infiltrated in the criminal network. The three of them will push Sergeant Elisa Codina and the foreman Jordi Carter, two members of the Catalan police who will have to fight, from very different positions, to try to put an end to the fight between the criminal groups.

Unfortunately, every day we see more news where stabbings, and even shootings are present in Barcelona; if you could talk to the writer of this novel, he could explain things where we would say that reality exceeds fiction, so I recommend you to read EL CONFIDENT where you will know the B side of a Barcelona six years ago, but where this fight was just beginning. Can you imagine where we are now? Only by delving into these pages you will be able to imagine it.

This book that I recommend today has pleasantly surprised me. Although Sara Teller was co-author with Ferran Cases of EL CEREBRO DE LA GENTE FELIZ (which has sold very well, we are on the seventh edition, and has been published in eight languages) and already started very well within the book world, now she takes a step towards personal wellness (something I never thought the brain could help and be involved in) with NEUROCUÍDATE. (TAKE CARE WITH NEUROSCIENCE). Sara tells us how understanding the functioning of our brain can help us to live better. Don’t you find it super interesting? When we breathe, love, smile, run, get angry, sleep or eat we are creating neural connections and releasing a myriad of neurochemical explosions in our brain; did you know that you will develop one type of brain or another depending on how you live, on the things you do in your day to day life, and you will feel and think in one way or another? I didn’t know that, but reading Sara in this very useful book, I have realized how many things can affect my brain and that I don’t know anything about it. The brain is a complex organ and needs energy. Besides, it controls what you think and feel, how you learn and remember, and the way you move.It also controls many things we hardly realize, such as our heartbeat and the digestion of food. That’s why it is so important and perhaps we don’t give it the importance we should. In this book, Sara discovers what emotions guide it, how moving our body improves our cognitive processes and makes us gain in mental and emotional health, how we can nourish it and give it rest so that it is in full capacity, how social networks impact us at a cognitive level or how we can gain in creativity and productivity.

Understanding the potential and imperfections of our brain, and discovering all its mysteries is key not only to knowing how to improve quality of life (mental and emotional), but also to knowing ourselves better.

It is a necessary, useful and understanding book so that by changing small things we can improve our personal well-being and the functioning of something so important in our body and, at the same time, so unknown as the brain.

For me, one of the great non-fiction titles of this season.

This week’s blog comes with a powerful title, a Non-Fiction title. Francesc Miralles, after NAMASTÉ, co-authored with Héctor García, comes with MAZAL, which has been awarded the Urano Non-Fiction prize and for this reason is coming out a little earlier than we would like, given that we are still savoring the success of NAMASTÉ, and we already have another great book on the market, and I say this firmly. I have been reading Miralles since he started writing, and each time I think that he cannot surpass himself, in each book, he does it, and in this one even more. I loved Mazal because through a simple and close story he shows you the power we have to attract good things.

The expression “MAZAL TOV” is a Hebrew locution that translates as “good luck”. It is a wish that is expressed aloud in Jewish celebrations and its meaning is “I am eager for good things to happen to you”. As always, it introduces us to a new word, which will be iconic for the daily lives of many. Who doesn’t like good things to happen to them? Here are the keys to doing so.

If we explore the deep meaning of each of the consonants that form this word, we will access the true secret of prosperity. The keys hidden in the word “Mazal” indicate that luck does not come “from above” but depends on our effort in three coordinates that we should know and put into practice. In this enlightening fable, Francesc Miralles offers us a fascinating and at the same time practical journey to the secrets of success in life, not only to work success, but to live well, to make the best things happen in your life and to live happily. The key is to learn it and apply it, and how: by the hand of the master and this powerful story that reveals the keys for fortune to manifest itself in your life. Advice that we receive through the simple but profound story of Saul, who after repeatedly failing in his life, accepts a mysterious job opportunity in Krakow, a destination as unknown as it is far from his reality. There he will meet a series of characters who will reveal valuable lessons for life, and above all an enigmatic woman who will teach him, step by step, the secret of the MAZAL, capable of changing his fate forever, or ours as well.

As always Miralles brings us closer to a new concept, giving us the tools for that well-being that our society is looking for and that is so hard to find because it always looks more outward than inward. Great book which will become a new philosophy of life for all those who want GOOD THINGS TO HAPPEN TO THEM.