Bruno Blog

A journalist and his teenage son, gotten apart from each other a few years ago, travel to Paris together to watch the final of the Champions League where the Barcelona will play. During the trip and the game they will be part of the epic excitement shared with all fans, each with their own experience of Barca and football. But they will also try, talking about Barca, to recover their relationship and re-tie the threads that bind generations between them and the rest of the family who stayed in Catalonia: the sick grandfather, the anguished grandmother, the mother who had to bring her children up…

A novel that explains a family through Barca, the “Barcelona feeling” through a family conflict, and with one thing and another, the threads of emotional and sentimental Catalan reality today.

Berta is about to turn seventeen years old. Her father, a writer of a certain success, died one year ago after a brutal aggression by a group of skinheads. Since then her mother has turn into a sort of ghost, a being without energy or personality, always filled of antidepressants and tranquilizers.

Berta fights to understand the world since a furious and radical individualism: she rebels against everyone who wants to make her a victim – teachers, psychologists, classmates – and, at the same time, as her only way of escaping and console herself, recovers her father’s work: to become a cold, distant and omniscient narrator of the instants that have marked her father’s life. She tries to discover the bonds of the familiar history that have remained undone.

The family’s past is converted by Berta narrator – who steals her father’s words, searching in the files hidden by her mother – in a series of mythological stories in which reality, memory and fiction get scrambled. These stories mix with the teen experiences of Berta, and are useful for her to explain herself and to make her search for a new identity.

In every family there are bonds that can not be undone.

To understand better the meaning of things and to explain the world to her daughter, this is what Joana does whilst cleaning up the beach with a tractor, collecting secrets brought by the sea and filling with thoughts the notebook of her life.

“Iolanda Batallé transmits everything that writes and even more.”, Laia Fàbregas.

“A sensibility that allows us to feel (…) the truth of what we truly are: fragile shadows walking in a rush.”, Ana Maria Moix.

“Such an extraordinary narrative voice that you don’t remember reading it, but feeling it, speaking to it.”, Ricard Ruíz Garzón.

“The writing seems transparent, nostalgic and bright and, nevertheless, it is loaded with strength, rage and roots.”, Constantino Bértolo.

“She uncovers the Pandora’s box of a generation accused to keep the gunpowder wet.”, Isidre Grau.

With the convincement of staying some time far from everyone and everything, Carles settles in a little mountain village with only one inhabitant. There he begins to practice taxidermy by his own. But what begins only as a hobby would become an obsession that would lead him to the last consequences.

An intense story that makes characters reach their limits in order to explore the dark part of human beings; a story that, with a sinister atmosphere, keeps the reader trapped until the end.

Rosa is thirty-six years old and is a photographer. When she was a child her father abandoned them and, since then, the shadow of that man whom she never met is chasing her life. One day Rosa receives a letter from Mexico announcing the death of her father. With a photography exhibition as excuse, she would travel to Mexico, where she would met her other family. Just before leaving, Angel, her partner, would ask her to have a child.

“Un pare possible” is a story, thoughtful and passionate at the same time, about paternity, relationships between men and women and family conflicts. This trip would mean for Rosa the reunion with her past where she would seek her own identity.