Today I recommend El tiempo que nos une, one of the best novels by Alejandro Palomas. One of my favorites. I remember when and how I read it, because it is one of those novels that mark you and you do not forget. This month, Destino has published it in hardcover, in a beautiful edition, with a prologue by Mario Gas, theater director who has brought to theaters the first part of this novel, La isla del aire, which had great success in its tour of Spain. It is a choral novel of female voices, which you understand, and which become unforgettable.

Grandmother Mencía convalesces with her granddaughter, Bea, who does not want to tell what really hurts her. This is the beginning of El tiempo que nos une, a saga of women with hearts so big that they are capable of harboring from the deepest love to the greatest suffering. Among the five protagonists of the story, family ties are interwoven to form a network that sometimes traps, sometimes embraces and, above all, protects. Mencía, the wise and outspoken matriarch; Lía, who always stays; Flavia, who lives in absence; Inés, a mother who suffers and a lover who laments; and Bea, the youngest, are unforgettable characters, who keep secrets but shout truths, and who feel, laugh and cry.

With delicacy and precision in language, Alejandro Palomas constructs a feminine universe of relationships and emotions that envelops us. And in El tiempo que nos une, as in life, many things happen, but in the end what matters is who has been sailing by your side.

Alejandro is a master of writing, and knows how to profile these female characters, that you hate them as much as you love them, that make you laugh and cry, and that ultimately make you vibrate. A text full of emotion, that has left no reader indifferent, and that is deservedly published in hardcover, after managing to make hundreds of readers fall in love with it in paperback format. I know that there are few fans of Alejandro who have not read this first saga of the author, but whoever has missed it should run to the bookstore, and whoever has read it in paperback should give the hardcover edition to someone who loves it very much, because it is a beautiful and unforgettable story of women: a wonderful gift for this Christmas.