Bruno Blog

We will never be the same again… and we don’t even need it.

Maica is the wrong woman, she has a heart that doesn’t fit in her chest and a chest that isn’t what it used to be. On the verge of fifty and a few more vertiginous precipices, she is divorced, the long-suffering mother of a teenage daughter and lives at odds with the world in general and with her mother and men in particular.
For the rest, this lawyer who has only herself to speak in her defense, addicted to work and to the well-meaning advice of her best friend, will begin a journey from bewilderment to acceptance along which she will learn that a well-managed sense of humor is not only the best antidote to any hot flash but the only compass capable of helping us get out of the worst storms with flying colors.

An unusual case has disoriented the police of Barcelona: in the tunnel of an abandoned metro station, a body appears in conditions difficult to explain and harder to believe. The corpse has had part of its face ripped off and a mask from the traditional Noh theatre in Japan has been placed in its place.

When the police unit in charge of the case is trying to understand what has led a person to commit such a crime, a second body appears in similar conditions. Next to her, lies the documentation of the ex-girlfriend of inspector Andreu Martí, who will face the most difficult case of his career.

The story of a woman who risked her life against the Nazis in World War II.

Pyrenees, 1940s. Sol Mentruit must flee her village and take refuge among a group of smugglers in Andorra for having witnessed a murder. Once there, he enters a network of evasion in which he begins to carry sensitive documentation to the British consulate in Barcelona. In the midst of her travels she falls in love with Max Schell, a quirky and intellectual Frenchman whom she discovers to be a German officer. When the leader of the network, Quim Baldrich, learns of the relationship between Sol and Max, he expels her, but she decides to perform a last act to prove her loyalty and take a group of refugees to cross the Pyrenees from Toulouse to Barcelona to save them. Different stories will intertwine until they converge in that moment that will be definitive for all of them.

The perfect manual you need to survive in the jungle of love and dating.

What if, after ten years of dating, your boyfriend sends you out to knead mud during a romantic dinner? Tragedy strikes the day before New Year’s Eve. Between tears, grapes and chimes, the friends of our protagonist spur her on with a challenge: “You have 365 days to find a partner”. And she accepts. Going through all the stages of grief after a traumatic breakup, she will link possible candidates in hilarious anecdotes, all inspired by real events.

A Single Woman’s Survival Handbook is a feminist and feminist comedy about what it means to be a single woman today. Finding a “normal” partner can become a risky sport. A tragicomic vision of the world of dating, sentimental relationships and the curious characters (men and women) that we can find in the love jungle of the 21st century.

This volume brings together all the short stories written by Maria Barbal up to now, both those published in volumes and those scattered in periodicals or in thematic anthologies, as well as stories still unpublished, which are offered for the first time. All the short narrative of someone who has stood out above all as a novelist, but who from the beginning dedicated to short stories such splendid volumes as La mort de Teresa, followed by Ulleres de sol, La pressa del temps, Cada dia penso en tu, Pampallugues or Bari.

The possibility of offering the totality of the stories in this volume, organized in a different way from how they had reached us until now, opens up a new dimension, a renewed reading, and consequently gives us the possibility of taking a contemporary look. A new cosmovision that helps us to better enjoy all his novels.

The voice is always forceful, powerful in nuances, largely thanks to a precise and rich language, which enters smoothly and soaks everything. It is with his unmistakable style made of conciseness, clarity, which denotes great expertise, that we capture this soul that vertebrates everything.