Three hundred thousand women who were deceived by all the doctors involved. Three hundred thousand women who now take to the streets, exposing their scars and demanding justice from the doctors who perpetrated the crime. Ana, an obstetrician gynaecologist and surgeon, who participated in the forced sterilisation campaigns, seeks to escape unharmed from her persecutors as she guiltily recalls the medical negligence in which she was complicit in the 1990s. Fearful, more than 15 years later, she tries to survive as a criminal against humanity by running an illegal abortion clinic with her ex-boss and lover, evading the media, the government, and her whistleblowers.

Can a mother be her daughter’s worst enemy? In [Her] (“[Ella]”), the mother is a prison where any love, affection, tenderness, or understanding has been exhausted. Instead, it has turned into a place of deep loneliness. A death impulse runs through the ruined house, which mirrors the state of the characters themselves. The situation of the daughter – who is the narrator of the novel– worsened decades ago when her father and twin brother left home. She resigned herself to being nothing more than the projection of her mother’s obsessions and desires. The mother kept her away from the world, building a hierarchical relationship of authority and submission. The daughter never had the opportunity to create a life of her own, and when the mother finally dies at ninety-four, it may be too late for her daughter to get a second chance. In this intense novel, which draws on both the psychological thriller and the Latin American family saga tradition, it is not clear that death implies liberation.

Sofia is facing the death penalty for murdering her sister. Tied to a wooden chair, she is tortured and forced to describe her crime in detail. The police, her persecutor, her psychiatrist, and her lawyer pay close attention to her confession. Sofía narrates the story of a tenaciously wounded family, haunted by ghosts and perversions. But she focuses on the terrifying tension between these two sisters who stand at opposite poles: if one represents beauty, the other embodies deformity; if one exercises power, the other is submission. While trying to explain the murder, this thriller exposes how sibling rivalry is as fierce as the unhealthy obsession with beauty. Sofia develops her own voice, which reveals her loneliness but also her cowardice.

Thorndike´s This Death Does Exist (“Esa muerte existe”) is an addictive novel that crosses the boundaries between insanity and abandonment, bringing the reader closer to a particular kind of sadness that occurs only when death surrounds us.