Aside from My Heart, Everything’s Fine (“Salvo mi corazón, todo está bien”) is the poignant, introspective tale of a priest confronted with the harsh reality of his own beliefs and human impulses.
Luis Córdoba, a priest awaiting a heart transplant made difficult by his heavy weight, is under house arrest in a house where two women and three children live. A kind and cultured man, film critic and opera expert, Córdoba generously shares his knowledge with this family without a father or husband.
Involved in their daily lives despite himself, he becomes a surrogate father figure, redefining his life choices in the face of a profound existential crisis. Through his interactions with characters brimming with „joie de vivre“, Córdoba leads us to reflect on the human condition, where benevolence triumphs over human desires and feelings.
Inspired by real events, this tragic and moving story, like a modern tale, enriches our hearts. Immerse yourself in this novel, where every page is an invitation to reflect and marvel.

Oblivion (»El olvido que seremos«) is a heartbreaking tribute to the author’s father, Héctor Abad Gómez, whose criticism of the Colombian regime led to his murder by paramilitaries in 1987. Twenty years in the writing, it paints an unforgettable picture of a man who followed his conscience and paid for it with his life during one of the darkest periods in Latin America’s recent history. Transcending the political, it shines as one of the most exquisitely written accounts of profound love between a father and son that modern literature has to offer. Oblivion gets a second wind with a graphic novel adaptation by the Catalan artist Tyto Alba,  whose exceptional drawings and watercolours give the characters new shade and meaning, adding a sculptural dimension to the book that, while respecting its essence, transforms it into an independent work of art.

Héctor Adad Faciolince’s intimate diaries What Was Present. Diaries 1985-2006 (“Lo que fue presente. Diarios 1985-2006”) read like an educational novel. Included here are those that date from the end of 1985 (when he was a 27-year-old student) until the publication of his most acclaimed novel, Oblivion (“El olvido que seremos”), in 2006. In them he relates the anguish of someone who, although he wanted to be a writer, wrote very little fiction and a lot about his obsessions, his lovers, and the difficulties of his daily life. Abad wanted to leave in writing, at least, that he was incapable of being a writer. A raw testimony about how a vocation is born and how one learns to face the difficult and exciting adventure that is life.

“It seems that I’m not capable of being anything, if it’s that I’m trying to be something. I am nothing: a writer who doesn’t write, except a diary. A lover who isn’t capable of loving. A father who doesn’t act like one. A distant husband.” (Héctor Abad)

In his latest novel The Farm (“La Oculta”), Héctor Abad presents us with the moving story of a closely-knit Colombian family.

When the Ángel family’s beloved home in the Antioquian wilderness falls into danger, they manage to defend it against the guerrillas and, later, the paramilitaries – but at a high price. When their parents die, Pilar, Eva and Toño have to decide the fate of their father’s legacy. While Pilar and Toño want to keep La Oculta, Eva, who experienced something terrible at the old farm house, is determined to sell. As the siblings each struggle with their own problems, their inner conflicts threaten to tear apart not only their home but also their family.

Written from alternating points of view in precise and atmospheric language, the Ángel family will win the reader’s heart immediately. Like his bestselling novel Oblivion, The Farm is part autobiographic, part fiction. It was number 1 among the bestselling novels in Colombia in 2014.

No one knows the recipe for happiness – and still Héctor Abad has given us a whole book of them. In A Culinary Manual for Sad Women (“Tratado de culinaria para mujeres tristes”), he shows us how to prevail against almost any misfortune, be it old age or melancholy, and enchants the reader with anecdotes that seem to come straight out of a witch’s cauldron.

Oblivion (»El olvido que seremos«) is a heartbreaking tribute to the author’s father, Héctor Abad Gómez, whose criticism of the Colombian regime led to his murder by paramilitaries in 1987. Twenty years in the writing, it paints an unforgettable picture of a man who followed his conscience and paid for it with his life during one of the darkest periods in Latin America’s recent history. Transcending the political, it shines as one of the most exquisitely written accounts of profound love between a father and son that modern literature has to offer. “Oblivion” has sold over 250,000 copies in Spanish and was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA.

The city of Angosta is divided into three parts, according to social standing. When the aspiring poet Andrés starts working for an organization that aims to expose the crimes of the upper class and the drug lords, he himself soon becomes a victim. Left behind are Jacobo Lince, the charismatic owner of an eccentric bookshop, and Candela, Andrés’s girlfriend. Together, they take up where he left off. Written in poetic language, the futuristic Angosta is a mirror of the violent reality of many parts of Latin America, and both a beautiful and terrifying modern fable.

“Truth and memory are always tinged with oblivion, or distortions of memory that are not recognized as such.” In this book, Héctor Abad discusses the difficulty of recomposing the past, summed up – as the title of the book indicates – as Betrayals to Memory (“Traiciones de la memoria”). The trigger for this journey into the past is a poem found in the bag of the author’s father, Héctor Abad Gómez, on the day of his assassination in Medellín, August 1987. The author wrote in his diary at that moment: “We found him in a pool of blood. I kissed him and he was still warm. But so still, so still. The rage almost choked my tears. The sadness wouldn’t allow me to feel the full extent of the rage. My mum took off his wedding ring. I looked in his bag and found a poem”. The poem, attributed by some to Jorge Luis Borges, becomes the protagonist of the book. In 2006, when Abad published Oblivion, some literary critics reproached him for having claimed Borges as the poem’s author in order to sell more books. In confronting this controversy, Abad began to investigate the origins of the poem. The task was not to be an easy one, owing to the fact that certain Borges specialists insisted the poem was not by the great Argentine writer. Through interviews and meetings with writers and journalists, the author ends up winning the battle over oblivion and betrayals of memory. In addition, the book contains two short chapters in which the author speaks of his experience as an emigrant in Turín, Italy, during his years in exile after his father’s assassination. He also reflects on the complex theme of the self and the other in literature.

A missing toe is the protagonist of the story and becomes the visual motif that animates the pages and invites the reader to search, count and chase: “I didn’t even know which toe was missing. I only knew it wasn’t the big one, because the big one was there, chubby, on the left side of the right foot. But it could have been any of the others: the little one, the one next to it, the one in the middle, the one that on the hand is the index finger. He had lost a toe and didn’t know which one”. 4 Toes (“4 dedos”) presents, in a funny and almost innocent way, classic themes of children’s literature such as monsters, aliens, and games, mixed with feelings of filial love, self-love, insecurity, and luck.

A Little Silver Ball (“Una bolita plateada”) tells of the intimate relationship between Ce and Cilia, granddaughter and grandmother (respectively), and how they build, between them, longings, dreams, motivations for life, and death. Also at the centre of the story is a little silver ball that Ce’s great-grandfather began to model, supposedly around something very valuable, and which over the years has been coated with different layers of aluminium foil, making it a perfect sphere. The ball passes from one generation to the next, with the intention that it will come in useful at a time of great need. But Cilia, despite the crises suffered during her lifetime, never dares to unravel the ball to get to the coin, the pearl, the diamond, or whatever is hidden inside. And she asks Ce, who will inherit the little ball, never to open it either, telling her: “It is better never to fathom what is contained in the heart of the ball, nor in the hearts of people.”

Hector Abad’s first children’s book can be read by readers of all ages, since it touches on deep and vital issues with great poetry: there are treasures that are hidden in the centre of the body, in the heart of memory and even in the middle of a little silver ball. Perhaps they are not visible, but they are there.