Bruno Blog

For ten years of his youth,three characters,two guys and a girl,fancied each other,doubted,love each other and brighten their respective lives. In the background two landscapes of the nineteen thirties:one tragic,the time of the great ideologies,of war,of death and one peaceful landscape, that of the summers in Favinyana,the clear skies of July on a friendly Mediterranean island.Years later,one of those three friends tells of the memories he has of that world. The final product is an ambitious,complex novel about the tension between ideologies and the individuals in a hard epoch.

In the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, Vílnius or Cracovia, some Jew girls were named by the German authorities to keep and maintain peace in the ghetto. Saül Steinberg was the president of Junderat, a nonexistent city of Byelorussia. This book tells the story about this man, living between betrayal and heroism. Vicenç Villatoro portraits the nightmare of the Holocaust combining fiction and non fiction, following the voices of some previous great writers such as Hannah Arendt, Albert Cohen, Salvador Espriu o Primo Levi.

Samuel lives trapped inside an air-bubble of loneliness which he only leaves to teach classes at the university. The impenetrable world that he has built up around him starts to fall apart the day a street cat enters his home. It will lead him to Titus, a middle-aged editor, who gives some essential lessons in life and takes him by chance to Gabriela, a childhood love, who reappears miraculously thirty years later, in the shape of an enigmatic woman. Samuel sets off on an initiation adventure full of surprising revelations. He will learn that those insignificant everyday acts, even the tiniest ones, have the power to unleash a hurricane or awaken the heart of his lethargy.

Following “Women on the edge”, this new series covers different, more complex and embracing territory topics. New themes are added to the classic themes of female neurosis, partners, children and the body. Here we find Maitena’s reflections on social and contemporary behaviour, trends and consumerism. With a touch of irony, “Curvas Peligrosas” perfectly depicts the signs and vices of these times. Sharp-edged and ruthless, yet with room for tenderness and, even, a faint and resigned melancholy. As if Maitena were drawing these curves in the road so that all of us, including herself, may drive through life with a little more sense of humour.

“Maitena has managed to express the hope and fears of her readers with great doses of wit and understanding.” Larry Rohter, “The New York Times”

”Maitena observes and suggests with perfidious candour. She takes everything in and presents it with a self-irony that contains a declaration of war: laugh, if you dare to.” Beppe Severgnini, “Corriere della Serra”

“…Perceptive, intelligent, vital… This woman is as profound as the universe straightforward as a road of knowledge. Through her eyes, we improve without the battle of the sexes.” Joan Barril, “El Periódico”, Barcelona

Manuel and Roberto, two young fans of fantasy novels, stumble upon an orginal English copy of H.Ph. Lovecraft, their favourite author, and a girl consulting him. The girl introduces them to a very special club. But how are this club, the girl, and a professor specialised in Lovecraft connected? What world is hiding behind that false door? The protagonists experience the mysteries of a Barcelona neighbourhood as the scene of a secret they are trying to solve.