Bruno Blog

The revolutionary invention of a young blind boy who saw what others could not. Coia Valls’ most ambitious work to date reveals the moving story behind the creator of the Braille system. A memorable novel about personal triumph that recalls Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt and, at the same time, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, with which it shares a heart-warming emphasis on family.

The youngest of a family of leather workers, Louis Braille suffers an accident that will gradually cause him to lose his sight in both eyes. However, driven by his own tenacity and the tenacity of those around him, the young boy refuses to give into despair and chooses instead to pursue a path of adventure and discovery that will take him far beyond anything his contemporaries would have dared imagine. Louis Braille grows up in the first half of the nineteenth century, a time of hope and rebellion, when turbulent currents are running through his native France. His life is a journey of light and darkness, of freedom and oppression, of health and infirmity. His is the touching story of how ingenuity can overcome a lack of resources. Coupvray, Paris, Limoges and Vichy set the stage for Louis Braille’s struggle, the struggle of a man of humble origins to discover the key that would enable the blind to cast off their chains and to discover the key to his own happiness as well.

The incredible story of a time where passion and love could be the only answer, and the only cure.

The year is 1918 and the Great War is devastating Europe when Gracia Ballesteros is forced to fly Barcelona without notice. She meets Carter Irvine in Burdeux, a young american man that has enlisted as voluntary to fight in the Old Continent. They fall into a relationship that will need to get over distance and the dangers ahead. In the midst of all, more and more people that are apparently well start dying because of the flu, an epidemic that will terrorize the world.

Marcel Furriols is no adventurer. In fact, he was born in an enclosed surrounding, not motivating at all, but not a lot of men can brag about having lived as intensively as he has. In his life journey he will meet some of the most amazing men of the early 21st Century: Santiago Rusiñol, Bertrand Rusell, Sigmund Freud, Otto Dix, J. M. de Sagarra… On the other side, he will also have to face with the horrors of war, illness, misery, social uprisings, prison loneliness, the yearning of a far and loved land, the pain of the lost love, and overall, the desire of revenge, the worst of all feelings.

Cinto Verdaguer’s, the priest, funeral, the bohemian environment in “Els quatre gats” or the recurrent visits to “El Cau Ferrat” in Sitges with his grandfather Conrad, will create in him develop critical thinking and a restless spirit. His only passion: being part of the history of thought and leaving an imprint in the world as the Great Men have done.

Sitges 1932. Invited by Santiago Rusiñol’s widow, Carles Solé arrives at Cau Ferrat. His aim is to write a tribute he wants to dedicate to the Modernist movement, but he is actually  pursuing a personal revenge against the great painters who did not allow him a place of privilege many years ago.

However, deep inside his heart beats another feeling much deeper. Being in love with Ramon Casas’ widow, Júlia Peraire, he will have to face several difficulties in this meeting with Modernism members that he has summoned. The intervention of a woman outside his plans will make of the result something he had not expected.

This book was awarded with the XXI Premi Nèstor Luján de Novel·la Històrica

An awarded novel about love and revenge in the vibrant creative world of the thirties  

Ana de Jesús, bastard daughter of Don John of Austria, enters an Augustinian convent when she’s six years old, because of his uncle Philip II’s order. Everything leads her to think that she’ll waste her life there, ignorant of the mysteries of the world, and that she’ll end up resting there forever without leaving its walls.

However, and naively, she finds herself wrapped up in a plan to dethrone Philip II of Portugal, with the Pope’s support. Once the conspiracy is discovered, Ana de Jesús sees how her main accomplice is sentenced to death and executed while she’s locked up in a convent in Ávila by the king’s express order.

When all hopes seem lost, and our main character is close to death, a whirlwind of intrigues unveils within the apparent peace of the cloister, which will lead her to become the most powerful woman in the Spain of her times.

La monja bastarda is an historical novel of adventures that grabs and immerses us in the unknown monastic world of the 17^th century.

Historical novel of adventures that grabs and immerses us into the unknown monastic world of the 17^th century.