In Queen of the Tamarugal (“Reina del Tamarugal”), once a year, when the Virgin of Carmen sets out to travel across her pampas, the town of La Tirana fills with pilgrims who dance for her and followers who celebrate her with devotion.
Fran, a woman in her thirties, arrives from the city to film a documentary about this religious festival. She uses the trip as a way to distance herself from the mounting pressure of organizing her wedding.
Cristi, a local teenager, turns her grandmother’s house into a parallel celebration with her friends — reggaeton, drugs, and alcohol — running alongside the town’s ecstatic festivities.
Fran’s melancholic gaze — and her camera — capture the faces, costumes, and fervour of the dancers, while Cristi’s frustration with her boyfriend, who flirts with drug trafficking, disrupts the fragile, unseen balance beneath the crowd, the music, and the folklore.
Malu Furche R., with her clear and visual prose, tells a story for the digital age: two voices that almost never meet but watch, follow, and affect each other without knowing it. In this her debut novel, she opens the desert to two women who seek silence as an escape from pressure.

Heat Islands (“Islas de calor”) unfolds in a world where the climate crisis has spiralled out of control. Rising temperatures have reshaped societies and forced humanity into a radically new way of life: water is a treasure, shade a salvation, night the new day, and daylight a forbidden space under military curfew.
Within this chaotic landscape, certain areas where concrete and buildings trap heat become literal “heat islands.” Like the stories in this collection, they contain the isolation and abandonment of those who suffer, the desperate attempts of people to find relief, and the cold opportunism of those willing to exploit others to survive. As the city’s fragments shift and burn in this man-made inferno, a spontaneous fire climbs the hill to the statue of the Virgin, stirring a sense of superstition and awe.
In her debut short story collection, written in sharp and vivid prose, Malu Furche R. envisions a world on the brink—one that refuses to end quietly, as its inhabitants continue to adapt even to a universal catastrophe.