Bruno Blog

After her son left home to get married and have his own family, Julia, a fifty year old housewife with a Literature degree, realizes for the first time that her life has been of little importance. Unexpectedly, she finds some notebooks written by her when she was a teenager. Reading them means a lucid shock between her promising past and her disappointing present; a discovery that will lead her to finish her marriage and travel to Stresa, a beautiful and placid corner in northern Italy, where she aims to find herself and think about her immediate future.

Llorenç, a mature handsome man and notable theatre actor, is temporarily living in Stressa at a house inherited by a friend. This old house is a calm and warm place to write the book he has been asked for about his experience as an actor.

Julia and Llorenç will meet coming from two different ways. She’s going. He’s coming back.  An unexpected encounter that will change the rest of their lives.

“El Rey del Maestrazgo” tells the store of the last months of life of General Ramón Cabrera, known as “El Tigre de Maestrazgo”, because of his harshness and shrewdness in the combat during the first Carlist War. Sicken of the civil confrontations, Cabrera remembers the years he fought with the carlists, when the applicant Carlos María Isidro de Borbón faced the regent queen, Maria Cristina, because of the throne’s succession after Fernando VII’s death.

The general’s memories get mixed with the telling of historical facts: the mutiny of the sergeants in La Granja (sevilla), that re-established the Contitution of 1812; the attack to the Ciudadela of Barcelona and the slaughter of the prisoners that were there; the Carlist Royal Expedition, that was on the point of entering Madrid and win the war; the palace’s intrigues and the part of the secret services in both sides, whit whom participated people as Eugenio de Aviraneta. A story, both literary and historical, about one of the most convulsed periods of Spanish History.

Published in Spanish by Martínez Roca

In an uncertain time in the future, a custom officer in Southern France finds a buried box with a text written in a strange language. He translates it and finds out that it is a story written in Catalan by Marcel, a 17 years old boy from Barcelona who time ago had to leave the city. Marcel’s time is a close future in which the effects of the climate change have been already clearly experienced: the Mediterranean coasts are the scene of hurricanes and there are lots of troubles with the energy and water supply. Drawn by some friends he decides to join in an organization called Bios, which is a kind of a terrorist sect, led by a disturbing character whose nickname is Mefisto.

An insurance company, owned by a foreign investor, is suffering an irreversible crisis. High-level executives, with spectacular wages, cannot even keep afloat a ship that is sinking progressively.

When the caretaker dies by a heart attack, a new person is hired, an ignorant rough man who likes giving advices. At the beginning, Próspero –that’s his name- is the target for all king of jokes and mockeries because of his provincial ways, his lack of education and his low salary: he earns half of the wages than the second person worst paid in the company. However, he will proof he is wealthiest showing what is left for all the workers after he had rested all their earnings and expenses.  

Soon the caretaker gets the fame of giving “golden advices”, and middle and high positions from all departments of the company increasingly stop by the reception to obtain “the caretaker’s gold”. He, in a subtle way, is regenerating the company from the bottom up to get back its profitability.

The arrival of an enigmatic man to a village in India revolutionizes the life of its inhabitants. Sitting under a tamarind tree, he communicates without words what seems to be the secret of happiness.

This extraordinary fable takes us to the subtle world of Khalil Gibran, to Hermann Hesse’s stories and to inspiring parables such as The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. El secreto del tamarindo is called to become a contemporary classic, it talks about the simple life understood as a gift and how beauty and love transcend language.

 An inspiring reading that opens new paths to find the keys of happiness.