Earth (“Tierra”) is a book that recounts the intimacies of history. Through the everyday memories of people from more than 100 countries, Alberto Torres Blandina narrates the great events and recent changes in humanity from the beginning of the Cold War to the present day. The years follow one another slowly, in a drone’s-eye vision that encompasses every continent.
It begins in August 1961 with Gertrud fleeing to West Berlin after receiving a tip-off about the construction of the Berlin Wall, while in Masatepe, Nicaragua, two wealthy families at odds – the Sánchez and the Ramírez – quarrel over two young lovers. In India, Kim complains about the changes that have left everything as it was, while Ahmed, Charles de Gaulle’s bodyguard in Algeria, frees his son who has been arrested by the police after being mistaken for a rebel. Donvé is born in the midst of anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa; Augustus, an anti-communist, discovers just before attacking the Americans at the Bay of Pigs that the revolution, as Commander Fidel Castro has just said in his speech, is socialist. In Fram, a Japanese colony in Paraguay, a young man of the second generation does not know how to tell his parents that he wants to be a tango dancer.
The book continues relentlessly for six decades, returning again and again to the same families, weaving a web of small and big events, of intimate lives and clashing collectivities, of projects and memories, showing us that, despite our skin colour and the fact that we speak very different languages with countless accents, we are all very much alike.

With Jávea Torres Blandina presents a relentlessly honest, autobiographical novel. The town of Jávea, situated on the coast south of Valencia, becomes a cipher of social background: any local who thinks something of him or herself owns a holiday home or at least a flat there. The narrator‘s family had neither of these. They were on the losing side after the Civil War and could make a living only with difficulty. Alberto did not receive private tuition in English like his privileged classmates, and when he turned eighteen, he worked in a factory to finance his studies. That was in 1994, and now, in 2016, he is sitting with three old friends having a beer in the country house that, of course, belongs to one of them.
All of them tell stories, and perhaps he has the most and the most exciting stories to tell. And yet, to this day, something seems to separate him from his friends. In a series of intertwined, linked stories, Torres Blandina lets us take a look at his family history, and he circles around the question that sociologists are increasingly asking themselves today: how influential are the different material and immaterial conditions into which we are born on our participation in society and the position we can achieve in it? At a high literary level, Jávea invites us to an entertaining and highly thought-provoking reading on an important topic of our time.

In Against the Wolves (“Contra los lobos”), a man is trapped in his own house where he discovers a strange presence for which he has no explanation. He has no idea that his story is closely linked to two idealistic teenagers who sealed a violent pact and to a vagabond the police found in the mountains, with the fingertips burned and the whole body decorated/laced with religious signs. They are the sick. The rare. The different. The improper. They inhabit the margins and should adapt to fit. Obey and camouflage to go unnoticed. Because the fight is unequal. Because they cannot win. Not in a thousand years they could … Or could they?, Paul thinks, ready to transcend all borders and to change the rules that should be changed. And Paul has a plan: flee from a false, arbitrary and imposed order. Find the door that will lead him to that place where everything we thought we knew stops serving. Where trails are not followed: they are drawn.

Valencia, Spain: All the animals are heading north as if drawn by a magnet. Even Micaela’s limping dog is determined to leave her home. Nairobi, Kenya: A cleaning woman reports her own son to her employers after he stole from them. Can a mother wish harm on her own child? These and other places all over the world are the settings for Alberto Torres Blandina’s new novel With the Cold (“Con el frío”), connected by short reports from an old boat called Esperanza that, like the animals, is heading north. On board there are men, women and children of all nationalities and races. Some think they are on another Ark. Others see themselves as offerings without knowing who or what for, just like no scientist can explain the continuing winter and the strange migration that is taking place. Con el frio reflects on topics like knowledge, the truth and the complex fabric with which this hyper-communicated and yet at the same time autistic world is woven. The different voices flow together, intersecting or running parallel to each other to uncover a world that is in dire need of answers. Written with biting wit in concise language, these interconnected, original stories surprise the reader at every turn, casting their spell on the reader.

In Things that could never happen in Tokyo (“Cosas que nunca ocurrirían en Tokio”), the protagonist Salvador Fuensanta works in Madrid airport, on the verge of retirement. He sweeps the corridors and watches people come and go. There are hundreds of stories he tells, whenever he finds the time, to his friend Juana, an older kiosk attendant. Some of the stories are unbelievable. But as he says, the truth is often unbelievable… and often starts with a lie. Like that woman that mistook him from afar for an old lover and even after she had realised that it was not him, decided to continue with the mistaken identity in order to finalise an unfinished love story. Or like the story about the strange Club of the Impossible Desires that designs lives made to measure, and rewards every new member with a free partner. There is the one about the young man who invented a language that removed all the bad in the world or the scientist who came across the man he himself should have been according to mathematical logic. Salvador has heard all these stories and many more. “Listen Mrs Juana, listen to this”, he says, and both of them smile like two teenagers discovering what love is.

This novel was compared to Muriel Barbery’s bestseller “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”. The author’s German publishing house DVA sold 15,000 copies.

There is nothing easier, we learn in Kids splashing Cat with Gasoline (“Niños rociando gato con gasolina”), than convincing a father his son is special. That he will be amongst the responsibles for changing the world, and for bringing a new spiritual and peaceful era to earth. The Aquarius Age. And then tell him about a school for children like them, where they will learn to develop their abilities before the world destroys them.

Since the end of the seventies the hippie movement and later on the new age believed in the Age of Aquarius and with this the widespread theory that its first leaders were being born amongst us. This is the story of four children, and the adults they became, chosen to lead the future and educated by a man inspired by his belief in one beautiful idea.

In his new novel Folding Map of the Labyrinth (“Mapa desplegable del laberinto”), Alberto Torres Blandina tells the subtly interwoven stories of Elisa, Jaime and Alberto. Jaime has a photo store, and although he loves his wife and daughter, everything seems predictable to him. His hobby is collecting his customers’ sexiest nude photos. One of them is Alberto, who photographs women in explicit poses until suddenly there are only romantic pictures of one girl. When Jaime happens to come across her at a station one day, he pretends to recognise her, introducing himself as Pedro. Elisa goes along with his story, and the two of them invent a new present. Elisa was happy with Alberto until she became the victim of a rape. After that, Alberto saw himself as a monster, sex as impure, and he withdrew increasingly, before finally walking out without explaining himself to Elisa. Shortly after that, Elisa meets the mysterious Pedro and begins a new life with him, promising to one another never to let their relationship become routine – until their carefully built paradise begins to crumble.

In a clear, authentic language, the three protagonists each narrate their own lives. What starts out an entertaining and witty read soon becomes a deeply moving story about human identity and good and evil that will occupy the reader long after the last page.