Bruno Blog

When the II World War has just ended, Erika Ernemann, apprentice in a Contax camera factory, is kidnapped with her mother and two hundred more people by the Russian army. The soviets have decided that only with technicians and German workers will they manage to set in motion the manufacturing of a Contax replica, the Kiev camera.

Many years later, in 1961, when the world shudders with the first news about the making of the Berlin Wall, Erika travels to Barcelona as a member of the German police. The murders of two young women remind her about the methods of her kidnappers and the terrible moments she lived as a teen. With the help of inspector Casajoana, she’ll try to find out the reason why everything has begun again.

The complexity of what lies behind those crimes surpasses the most fertile imagination, and Erika finds really difficult to explain those without immersing herself back into her past, without reliving again the facts that she has always wanted to forget.

An inspiring crime story based in the life of the photographer Erika Ernemann and set in the world of classical photographic cameras, when technology was still measured by mechanical precision and the beauty of pictures was a result of chemical processes that now seem doomed to disappear.

Seamen inhabit the enclave of Isla de Lobos, which comes a castaway without memory but past. Little more than a tongue of lava and black stones, a rock between seas is the very place where are main characters a geographer, a Santero, a counter wave and a lady who rules with an iron hand the destinies of the insula, plus Emerald mulatto woman and her daughter Albabella, talking with sea lions and lives in a cave.

And a volcano that watches the designs of those who dwell time that mirage, the small scrap of land and jetties in the middle of the ocean, little more than a mustard seed fallen on the tablecloth immense sea.

In this universe of closing, on which it weighs an inescapable curse, the appearance of a nameless man and naked on the beach sand, thrown by waves, pose a threat to try to conjure imposing an almost impossible task. As he complies, forces greater than those of a mortal quietly working to change the fate of Isla de Lobos, this border does not appear on maps and almost is not in the world.

Isla de Lobos is awarded by Valencia Alfons the Magnanimous 2016 Narrative Prize.

“With the imagination of Garcia Marquez and prose Carpentier, José Vicente Pascual shows that banks are discovered in the literature.”

Víctor del Arbol, writer, Premio Nadal 2016

“A waste of imagination, with an absorbing prose, exuberant, capable of combining humor and drama. A reading pleasure. “

Rosa Ribas, writer

Ever since their inauguration in 1940 as the first subterranean galleries in Europe, the luxurious Avenue of Light has been a mirror for the changes in the Barcelona of the post war.

Julia, a young made that just got to the city, will begin a romance with a train supervisor from Sarriá and, a few years later, a forbidden passion that will bring them terrible consequences. She will be a witness to the evolution of the gallery throughout time and of some of the traders like Rosita, daughter of the owners of the bakery, who will live her first love with the attendant at the Avenue of Light movie theater, while she dreams with the learner of the barber, involved in political activities.

A lady of mysterious fortune who opens a typewriter shop. A perfumer who’s involved with powerful men in the regime. A railway worker who writes poems while he walks between the columns. These are the characters that make up a world that keeps changing, decade after decade, following the exciting beat of Barcelona from the postwar till the end of the eighties.

In the beginning of the middle Ages two women with very different beliefs are in Gallaecia land. Aetheria belongs to a community of women who have made religion their way to escape the demands of the nobility, but is secretly part of the Priscillianist movement. Irene is the daughter of a Roman senator that, with his family being besieged by the Christians who now control the power, decides to serve the cause of paganism. Symmachus, governor of Rome and spokesman of a noble class which continues to boost the banner of paganism against the official thesis, tries to convince the Emperor that the greatness of Roman civilization is rooted in ancient beliefs. The aim is to gather evidence to prove it and block the advancement of Christians. Upon hearing that the community of women from Gallaecia holds the Cato Treaty, Symmachus sends Irene with the intention of stealing the book and present it as testimony to the greatness of the old beliefs. In a context of social and religious struggles, Etheria, aiming to travel to the Holy Land seeking his freedom, and Irene, who wants to avenge her family, will discover that not so many things separate them.

In a period of upheaval like the decade of 1890, an attack during the Corpus line from the Santa María del Mar church leads Barcelona to be declared in state of siege. The tragedy of the dead victims adds to another one: the imminent arrest of workers with libertarian ideals, considered violent anarchists. Magda, a cigar seller in a theater in Paralelo, is afraid for her brother Pep, arrested by mistake three years before because of another attack, in the Liceu. She’s not mistaken: the police are after him, and not only him, but his wife too. Magda and Tina, a relative with who she lives in the neighborhood of Poble  Sec, will find him in the dungeons of the Montjuïc castle, claiming his innocence. The link with the workers and the Union leader, Teresa de Claramunt; the staging by a young amateur theater company of a play by the symbolist Ibsen and the link with the modernist artists Ramón Casas and Santiago Rusiñol will set the steps for her own personal tragedy. Meanwhile, a mysterious medium, Angelica, will try to discover why the arrests are happening and she will defend the two women.

A story of crossed lives, in which the confusion of identities and a series of mistakes turns everyone into a suspect. A drama set in the whole Montjuïc process, which imprisoned more than five hundred people; lawyers, teachers, journalists and thinkers, amongst others.

A time when innocence and truth aren’t a guaranty of freedom.