Coia Valls is writer of seven novels, and our story began with a casual lunch in a tiny restaurant in the Gracia neighborhood. Coia came with Xulio R. Trigo, her partner and author of the agency, to discuss about his literary things. Coia’s honest smile, her proximity, her way of being captivated me from the very first moment. Coia is a woman that fills the places, although she tries to be discreet, but she has a light, a special light, and when she told me that she also wrote, a world was opened for me: a new adventure, a path to start together that we have been walking since 2008.

We have grown up together in this literary adventure and the truth is that we have forged a healthy friendship, which some say does not exist, because “you cannot mix work and friendship”. I had the opportunity to think of her for a project. I finally did it and I made no mistake: we published EL MERCADER, a book that is still alive today, after almost eight years and we started a career in Ediciones B, together with Ernest Folch, which was extraordinary.

This year we released her last novel, LOS CAMINOS DE LA LUZ (the paths of light), the story of BRAILLE. It has been special again with a character as important as Braille, who invented the alphabet for the blind, special for who he is and for this novel written from the heart. She put himself in the skin of a character who was born seeing and then enters the deepest darkness. How a child and his relatives overcome a hard blow like this in a small rural French village, and during the revolutionary France: this is the story of Louis Braille, in an atmosphere that reminds us of LES MISÉRABLES by Victor Hugo.

Coia couldn’t make a better novel and for this reason, I can’t stop recommending it, because I believe that apart from being a beautiful story, it is necessary to give voice to someone who, from the shadow, has enlightened many people. Only Coia with her special light could have written this novel.