The story begins with the tragic murder of a father and his daughter in a small town in modern-day Paraguay, a case assigned to two local policemen. It alternates with flashbacks that take us to the origins of the unmatched instrument, signed by the luthier Antonio Stradivari in 1737. From then on we see it pass from hand to hand across Europe until it falls into the grasp of a Nazi official who ends his days in Latin America. Each time and place is recreated with just the right blend of information and emotion, intimacy and atmosphere, historical figures interacting with fictional characters, all caught up in the centuries-long intrigue of which the instrument is the axis. The Mystery of the Last Stradivarius (“El misterio del último Stradivarius”) invites readers to embark on an exciting journey between the inherent laws of the detective genre and following a historical thread through the depths of the souls of those who have owned the instrument. The violin also functions as an amulet, a powerful object believed to protect its possessor from all harm. The sublime music it produces puts its listeners in direct contact with a supernatural dimension, highlighting the transcendence of art.

Durruti is a feared and respected figure in the criminal underworld. His business involves stolen cars, dismantling them and selling their parts, and other related activities, typical of his field. But above all, his business is keeping order: ensuring that no one does anything he doesn’t approve of, that the police and the political authorities, with whom he has a cast-iron pact, are not forced to overact and break the criminal harmony by actions that aren’t part of the script. It isn’t easy to keep everyone in line. It would only take one spark in the wrong place at the wrong time to upset the balance.
Life unfolds. A man is jealous of his wife and follows her with unexpected consequences. A mother is happy about her daughter’s promotion, unaware that she isn’t exactly working as a secretary in that sought-after downtown apartment. Her sister always wanted her to learn her spiritual wisdom from her; who knows, it might have saved the young woman.
The spark ignites; that disturbance, slowly, precipitates others; each one greater than the last. The younger foot-soldiers murmur and stop following orders; the neighbourhood becomes unsettled; outbursts and improvisation take over. The spiral of violence expands and encircles them all. Suspicion replaces secrecy and respect; the old order is shaken, waiting for a new one to arrive, and this is not necessarily good news.
In Scrapyard (“Desarmadero”), Eugenia Almeida makes full use of the codes of the noir series to construct a storyline where corruption and crime reach all layers of society. With terse writing and an extraordinary mastery of the oral register, she tells a great story based on small events that produce uncontrollable consequences. Its plot could be set in any Argentinean city, its characters scrambling to escape the abyss that opens up before them.
The final sentence sounds both consoling and optimistic: “I am going to help you”. But in reality, it condemns the poor devil to whom it is addressed to never again being free in his life, as had happened to Durruti because of his love for his little brother, the Nene, and as will happen to everyone because the system is bigger than all of them.

A personal alphabet that aims to find the meaning of writing in a cluster of stories that connect with her life through secret passages. This is the form that Eugenia Almeida gives Flooding. The Secret Language We Are Made Of (“Inundación. El lenguaje secreto del que estamos hechos”), a book that crosses genres, dragging and revealing traces of experience, strands of stored emotions, voices, absences, desires.
The author writes Flooding as a long, wide-ranging letter, at a solitary fair, to a recipient who Almeida herself postulates, consolidates and enchants in their existence, with the passionate commitment of “that function of the species”, which is language. The pleasures and displeasures of an act of writing that is done “with the whole body”.

Eugenia Almeida’s superbly written crime novel Threshold Tension (“La tensión del umbral”) is both a gripping story and an astute study of human behaviour.

Guyot, a brilliant but headstrong journalist with a tragic personal history, becomes obsessed with the suicide of a woman whose motives for killing herself seem connected to past events: a series of alleged murders and suicides relating to a highly feared criminal in league with the military. But what really happened? And how is Julia, the suicide victim, connected to those events? As Guyot digs deeper, the dark secrets about the desaparecidos begin to surface. At the same time more and more of those he involves in the case end up dead or injured. When his new lady friend Vera is threatened, Guyot has to make a painful decision.

Written in refreshingly straightforward language, this novel keeps the reader’s attention with its strong characters and the sheer force of its carefully constructed storyline.

The Room at the Back (“La pieza del fondo”) tells the quiet and tender story of a group of people who live on the edge of society and are still able to show solidarity to each other, in spite of pain and loneliness. An old and dishevelled man sits on the same bench every day, unmoving and silent. Only Sofía, a harassed waitress in a run-down bar, tries to help. When he disappears, a whole set of parallel events are set in motion.

The Bus (“El colectivo”): A small town in the Argentinean provinces. A bar, where an unknown couple are waiting for the bus. As are Marta and Antonio Ponce, whose sister wants to depart. Clouds are drawing close in the sky, without bringing rain, as always. But something peculiar happens: The barriers of the railway crossing, abandoned long ago, are lowered and the bus roars past the bar without stopping. No one can leave the little town.

The Ponces have lived here for 32 years – as a wealthy lawyer, Antonio, seemingly on the wrong side of the rails, in the poor quarter. At the time, Marta became pregnant and Ponce felt obliged to ask for her hand in marriage. When she lost the child, it seemed too late to him to cancel the wedding. But she hadn’t even wanted to marry him and confessed she had only given in to him that night out of pity. This he never forgave her. He sought revenge by forcing her to a monotonous life at his side.

The accelerating bus turns into a spectacle, drawing in larger crowds every night. Confusion prevails, only the lovers make their way on foot along the rails. In the meantime, at the small police station, incidents follow in quick succession. Orders are now given by the military and at dead of night it comes to a shootout on the railway tracks. The next morning, the barriers are lifted; the Ponces are once more on their way to the bar, for once again, the bus stops for the passengers. At last it rains. The newspapers report the death of two dissidents. Who could ever be able to recognise the couple from the bar on the blurry photograph?

In sober prose, the author draws on her diffuse childhood memories of the dictatorship, to tell of internal and external suppression and its fatal consequences.

In her novel Sisters (“Hermanas”), which draws on autobiographical elements, Gisela Antonuccio tells the story of two unequal sisters in Argentina at the turn of the millennium. Vanesa is the adopted daughter of a middle-class Italian couple. When she is three years old, the couple has a biological daughter, Lorena, who not only suffers from various health problems but also turns out to be the more challenging child in other aspects. The older sister, very obedient and rule-oriented, soon becomes the true caretaker and educator of Lore, as both parents spend their days away from home in pursuit of prosperity for the family. This tightens the bond between the sisters. However, when Lore reaches puberty, conflicts erupt, and Vanesa finds herself powerless against her sister’s verbal and physical attacks. The question of her own identity increasingly takes center stage. Vanesa leaves for Italy with a scholarship in search of her roots, while Lore deviates further from the path and even seeks treatment multiple times for her drug addiction. Despite all their outward distance, the sisters remain connected and ultimately reunite in a consolidated relationship, with the possibility of newfound happiness.

Antonuccio narrates this poignant story, written in concise prose, from the immediate perspective of experience. In brief chapters, she immerses Vanesa into the recalled scenes, giving them intense presence and significant psychological authenticity. The conflict with her sister and the feeling of being lost evolve into existential questions about one’s place in the world.

Sisters is the construction of two possibilities of being in a story, of the bifurcation of paths to find each other again, of love, finally, unconditional. With concise and forceful prose, Gisela Antonuccio creates a moving story of surrender, forgiveness and roots.

With her refreshing comments on younger women’s conflicts in the era of e-mails, text messages and Facebook, Ofelia is the new heroine of the comic strip. In nine small images per page she tells us a whole story: Be it lovesickness, self-esteem or the imponderable ways of life, Ofelia will surprise us and make us laugh with her very real existential dilemmas and her audacious vision of herself and the world around her.

His first novel, May your Heart not be disturbed (“No se turbe vuestro corazón”), was recommended for publication by Julio Cortázar himself and talks about the innocence of childhood and the mercilessness of war. Five years later, with his book Shipwreck of the Stars (“El náufrago de las estrellas”), Eduardo Belgrano Rawson had already made a name for himself as one of Argentina’s most brilliant narrators. The novel was awarded the Premio del Club de los Trece. It is a story of tragedy as well as profound love. Belgano Rawson is one of the very few Latin American authors to be compared to great Anglo-Saxon literary figures such as Hemingway and Ondaatje.

Fuegia (Tierra del Fuego) was awarded the Critics’ Prize as best Argentine novel in 1992. Here the author gives an account of the last days of the people on Tierra del Fuego at the beginning of the 20th Century. After being raped, the native Camilena Kippa decides to leave the English Mission with her family. The danger-ous path to their destination, the country of seals, leads through the area of shepherds, the territory of the white intruders. With a language that is simulta-neously austere and poetic, the author depicts the apocalypse of this part of the world. In one of Argentina’s most important newspapers, La Nación, the novel was celebrated as Argentina’s most moving novel of the last decades.

Fuegia is going to be adopted as a documentary. Currently, the author is working on the screen-play.

After Secret News from America (“Noticias secretas de América”), where the author recorded the history of his continent in the way he would have liked to have been introduced to it, he published the novel Setembrada. Although set during the bitter war between the alliance of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against the small country of Paraguay from 1865 to 1870, one is compelled to follow the story, as if it were taking place at present. Belgrano uses short and precise sentences to tell a moving story of love and friendship in war.

In Rosa from Miami (“Rosa de Miami”), the reader is kidnapped to the Caribbean of the 1960s right up to the present, populated with fictional as well as real characters such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Ernest Hemingway. Belgrano Rawson once again mocks all official historiography and instead tells of people who, as victims or culprits or both simultaneously, were involved in these historic events, each in their own personal way.

Belgrano Rawson’s latest novel The Sermon of La Victoria (“El sermón de La Victoria”) tells the riveting tales of Nelson and Jorge’s doomed fates, based on two genuine cases. Nelson is held responsible for a crime he didn’t commit and sent to prison while Jorge’s wife and newborn son disappear during the dictatorship, like so many others. Both become victims of a state that has not yet overcome all the shadows of that time.

Bizzio immerses us in a fascinating literary experiment with an international fashion magazine, which he turns into the raw material for a reinvention of language, and using the cut-up. We Know What Happens at Night, Snail (»Sabemos lo que pasa por las noches, caracol«) is the result of a work that defies all kinds of conventions left and right. As well as a play with words, the work is a singular reflection on the nature of language, of meaning and its capacity to evoke emotions and sensations (in this case extremely strange ones). In short, „almost everything in these pages“ invites us to enter a unique universe, made of both conscious choices and chance, where creativity and imagination – both Bizzio‘s and the reader‘s – are the exclusive protagonists.

In A Beautiful Place (“Un lugar precioso”), two novellas (about the holiday of a couple who meet an unexpected acquaintance on the beach, and the unusual small-town nature of Martian abductions) are connected by the paranoid idea that approach and invasion function as synonyms. A beautiful place designates both the familiar space of the beach house and that of a parallel, simultaneous universe accessed by crossing the crystalline membrane of a bubble. But what strategy, however complex, can be employed to cope successfully with the surprises of fate, which test us in the uncomfortable presence of a person or the disturbing familiarity with a being from another planet? In Bizzio’s irreverent literature, the phenomenal pleasure of the written sentence can be followed by a crackle of splintered nerves, and the idyll by a hell of interstellar bureaucracy.

Mirages detach themselves from reality like the mercurial vapor of distance on a road. Ethereal. It is there and yet unreachable. When we think we have mastered it, what we believe to be real folds in on itself, or unfolds like a magician’s handkerchief.
Sergio Bizzio pulls back the curtain. Everything seems to be as it is. And yet… knock on the glass and some peculiar members of the human species reach extraordinary speeds; a doll comes to life and dies, or someone has to struggle with the power to make all their wishes come true…
In Bongo Fury, Bizzio reveals the richness of his art. Time accelerates exponentially; voices become inaudible; geographies shift and bodies twist in unusual acrobatics. Each story opens up to the unknown dimension of the times we live in.

Beyond the well-known stories of Juan Díaz de Solís, Pizarro, Magellan and Columbus, there are many others that were forgotten and lost; some distorted and falsified, and others, perhaps, that never had the chance to be told. Bizzio takes advantage of the gaps in history to give free rein to his imagination in a short, intense piece about the clash of civilisations.

The Lost (“Perdidos”) is a fast-paced novella, told in the first person through the diary or logbook entries of an explorer of the new world. A surprising and dynamic read with powerful and well-constructed episodes that weave together a succession of encounters and misfortunes, adventures with the indigenous people and nature in a jungle as dangerous as it is beautiful: the Amazon. Showing the fragility, helplessness, fear and sense of humour of these men who, despite their role in history (in today’s eyes destructive and criminal), were still fathers and sons with families on the other side of the ocean to whom they hoped to return.

-What are you doing disguised like that? Aren’t you warm?
-I’m not disguised, I’m from another planet.

Three Martians (“Tres marcianos”) are three brilliant tales with protagonists who come from the countryside, the city or other planets.

A gaucho assures his courtesan that there is a flying saucer parked on the top of a mountain and that, that very night, they are invited to meet its crew.

A being that can only be visited by appointment has shaken the life of the whole village; the neighbours are unable to comprehend what happens during these encounters.

After a space journey of more than two years, a couple meets again, but the embrace becomes unsettling: the other seems to be not exactly the same person they left behind.

Three close encounters of the first kind in the best Bizzio style: captivating from the first line, visual throughout and leaving the impression – or the doubt – that they really happened.

After their wedding party, Carlos and Irina go on a honeymoon: Ten Days in Re (“Diez días en Re”). She is happy; he is still a little drunk. They take a plane, get on a barge, and after many hours travelling they arrive at the beaches of Re. The landscape is perfect. And while looking at Irina smiling from the shore, a devastating certainty falls over Carlos: he does not love her. This thought stuns him in such a way that his arm is left stiff for days and he can’t move it. Carlos wanders like a soul in pain trying to make sense of his existence and thinking about how to proceed.

From what is initially perceived as a story of a separation, something else soon arises. The story mutates and twists, and drags us through the sand of its tropical paradise into the deepest bewilderment. On the scenography of a honeymoon, Bizzio sets a series of elements that stretch the limits of reality. Page by page the story becomes a new one, becoming thick and magnetized like the jungle that surrounds the characters. Once again Bizzio unfolds his sharply delicate prose, immersing us once more, with a disturbing naturalness, in a universe full of strangeness.

At the age of twelve, Irina lost her mother in a road accident. The next day she was sent to live with her father in Huel, a tiny village in the middle of the plains. For years she had not heard from him. She could only remember him as an office worker with an orderly life. Now he was a savage who looks after his physique: he eats raw eggs for breakfast, breaking them directly into his mouth, dressed in a sack and tie.

Life in Huel is monotonous and idle, until her father’s ex-wife returns with the intention of taking their house from them. They begin to build a new one nearby, but day after day they find the foundations destroyed. From then on, the plausible begins to get strange and twisted.

In My Life in Huel (“Mi vida en Huel”) Sergio Bizzio explores with delicate precision the social, aesthetic and amorous fantasies of an out-of-the-ordinary teenager in a world where the borders of the possible become increasingly diffuse. His mastery of the construction of atmosphere keeps us floating, flying over the land of an unusual and disturbing village.

Borgestein tells the apparently everyday story of a marriage crisis. Julia is an actress who only ever thinks of her career. When her husband is attacked by one of his patients he withdraws to a house in the mountains to think about his own life and their life together. With typical absurd narrative moments and unexpected twists and turns, the author has created a jewel of current Argentine writing.

As a star author grows tired of his success, he uses a plane crash to stage his death and starts a new life in the jungle. In his latest novel The Eaten Writer (“El escritor comido”), Bizzio takes the reader on an unusual and imaginative adventure while posing elementary questions on mankind today.

Written with the quiet humour and the fresh and concise style that characterise Bizzio’s books, Aiwa tells a tender and unusual love story in a world both bizarre and ordinary. When the teenagers Aiwa and Sony meet, it is love at first sight, but they have to hide their relationship. However, there are mysterious changes going on in Aiwa’s remote village, and soon a group of scientists disturbs their quiet life. What will they find?

In Bizzio’s novel Reality (“Realidad”), an Arabic terrorist commando hijacks an Argentine television channel in order to put pressure on the government to hand over a traitor. The Afghan head of the intruders is fascinated by the dynamics of the broadcasted reality show Big Brother and decides to use it to dismantle Western values. Indeed, the candidates accept any form of humiliation in order to become famous. As the hijackers are finally overwhelmed by the police, the fictional existence of the contestants ends and they return to real life – or is it the other way round?

It Was the Sky (“Era el cielo”) tells the story of a faltering relationship. Only a few days after making up with her, a man watches his wife being raped. He remains undiscovered and the two of them never utter a word on the matter. Caught up in the resulting dynamics, the protagonist sleepwalks towards the edge of a psychological abyss, only saved by his love for his son.

Rage (“Rabia”) is a fast-paced love story revealing the lives of the lower classes with psychological empathy and a good dose of black humour. After a heated argument with his foreman, the construction worker José María ends up strangling him and flees to the palatial villa where his girlfriend Rosa works as a maid. Hiding out in one of the attics, he watches the family. Then Rosa is raped…

He Who Is Thirsty (“El que tiene sed”) is a beautiful and painful novel that tells of a world bordering on madness: alcoholism, its hell and a breathtaking metaphysical adventure. How to satisfy the impossible, how to fight against the inexhaustible thirst that does not recognize origin, how to realize that life itself is the realization that happiness does not exist. These are the questions that torture Esteban Espósito, an alcoholic writer, in his lucid and drunken perception of reality. With lyricism and crudeness, the author manages to investigate the extremes of human degradation, the daily guilt, the humiliation and the outbursts of fate that push to the very limits of authenticity. The masterly prose of Abelardo Castillo transforms the experience into a true work of art where language acquires all the splendour of the shudder.

Esteban Espósito, a young writer with an alcohol problem and a penchant for theological inquiry, arrives in the city of Córdoba for a literary symposium he could not care less about. The city is as mythical as it is real, a place where time seems to behave in an inexplicable way, and where Esteban will spend thirty-six decisive hours of his life. October 1962. The imminence of war due to the missile crisis. This is the backdrop to Chronicle of an Initiate (“Crónica de un iniciado”). The love of Esteban and Graciela, the unforgettable figure of Santiago, the Rabelesian apparitions of Father Cherubini and the demonic professor Urba, the traps of benzedrine and sex, the mystery of a city founded cabalistically, make up an exciting surface plot under which lies the real one: Esposito’s journey of initiation that will connect him with other existential searches, with delirium, with the problem of time, with the meaning of life and death, recreating Faust’s pact with the devil for the sake of our arts.

Castillo manages the threads of uncertainty and gives us a monumental novel whose centre is an encrypted knowledge: “there is a secret order, the devil told me”, the protagonist of this chronicle confesses. Is Esteban going to sign the Pact? Does he even have a choice? In the tradition of Goethe and Thomas Mann, of Arlt and Marechal, the metaphysical depth and perfect architecture of “Crónica de un iniciado” simply dazzle.

The Gospel According to Van Hutten (“El Evangelio según Van Hutten”) is a bold and captivating revisionist reconstruction of the origins of the Christian era: conspiracies, detective intrigue and fantastical erudition.

How far are the gospels riddled with false claims, and how much important information about the Dead Sea scrolls has been censored? Were the Essenes a secret community split off from Orthodox Judaism, as well as the forerunners of Christianity and educators of Jesus Christ? Was Christ a mere saboteur of doctrines, rather than the son of God? During a vacation in La Cumbrecita, a middle-aged history professor discovers that the controversial archaeologist Estanislao Van Hutten, presumed dead, lives hidden from his detractors with a secret that could shake the most deeply rooted religious beliefs. The revelations made to the historian about the Holy Scriptures are based on the discovery of the ancient Dead Sea scrolls that call into question the official version of the figure of the Messiah.

Abelardo Castillo offers the reader the adventure of decoding a large palimpsest, while enjoying the escalating intrigue. An intelligent novel, original and solidly constructed upon the revelation of a truth: that to be does not need proof.

Chiaraviglio argues that There Is No Couple (“La Pareja No Existe”) instead there is a bond between two people that is built step by step.
When did being in love turn into a toxic fairy tale? Ending a relationship, or reviving the fire, means acknowledging love as energy emanated from a healthy conscience. Dr. Nilda Chiaraviglio provides tools and key thought to build connections through agreements that deal with sensitive topics such as sex, money, and family. Can you choose how to connect and fi nd pleasure with the person you love? According to the author, “Yes! you can— and it’s beautiful”.
There Is No Couple is the first book in Chiaraviglio’s trilogy on relationships.

Following a devastating health diagnosis, a man who is a reader, husband, father and son must become a witness and testimony to his own story. In this task, finding the right words becomes essential. There is no longer any room for misunderstanding in this emotional and literary cartography composed of fragments. Every detail counts, promising either disaster or salvation. Faced with chaos, he searches for signs, invents plans and longs for refuge. But where can he find shelter?
Perhaps he will find it in a verse by Paul Celan, one of those that tear at the soul, or in the furious invective against a book by Susan Sontag on illness. Or perhaps in a brief encounter in Buenos Aires that, by mysterious chance, holds the mythical power of a past that can rewrite the present. Or even in an old hotel on Lezica Street, where orphanhood and words can finally regain their breath and restraint.

A personal, sober and moving journey, Magnetic Window (“Ventana magnética”) captivates with its erudite intelligence and deep sensitivity. Fernando Fagnani invites us to share in an intimate discourse where fate, affection and the unexpected take on the most human of dimensions.

Humans plan and destiny decides. In Permanent Residence (“Residencia permanente”) the protagonist must react to an external event that he does not control, and which will change the course of his life forever.

Benítez has travelled to a Central American capital for business and at the same time revisit an old lover, of whom he has not had news for a long time and with whom, without knowing it, he has a son. His visit, however, coincides with a popular revolt. Suddenly, a peaceful place becomes a dangerous territory. He calls his client in Buenos Aires and asks to be rescued. The client complies and puts him up in the Argentinean Embassy. He observes the uprising spread from behind the curtains, the chances of escape seem minimal. But Yolanda, an Embassy employee, gives him the key that can get him out, warning him that he will have to put in a lot of effort. The route passes through a forest, in the centre of which he will find a gypsy community and a certain Baidur, the leader of the group, who will be able to help him. Benítez has no choice but to leave and rely on the help of this man and his people. The tranquillity of the forest contrasts with the noisy streets, the friendly atmosphere of the gypsies with the hostility of the city. The community is a small, alien universe; they have their own rhythm, their own rules. Benítez is welcomed and given directions to the neighbourhood where his lover, Rebecca, is supposed to live. When he finds her in her ransacked house, she is dead: she has been one of the chance victims of street violence. He also finds a helpless child – his own son, of whose existence he was unaware. Benítez decides to hand his son over to the gypsies to take care of him while he plans what to do next. He feels a wave of parental emotion for the child before saying goodbye. He promises to come back for him. But his plans do not take account of a final attack that finds him unprepared.

Written in dry, precise and elegant prose, Permanent Residence tells the story of a man who has decided to close the wounds of the past. He has, however, chosen the worst moment to do so. Despite references to some very specific events, the story seems timeless. It has an atmosphere of ease and suspense at the same time. It has a light and silent tone that dominates the rhythm of the narrative. Benítez is not a winner, and in the end he pays with his life. But he is a hero in the sense that with his firmness of character and his skills, he overcomes his fears and all the obstacles he faces. Fagnani is a great observer of destinies and human behaviour.

Julia dreams, dreams Ema (»Julia sueña, sueña Ema«) is a story about friendship, about the kind of light that friendship casts on life almost without us realising when the other is there, by our side, so much so that life is a dream, and dreams are full of wonderful coincidences. Two girls meet at school but shyness does not allow them to tell each other how much they like each other, yet what does not happen in class or at recess, happens on another plane… following the clues of these wonderful dreams.

In Dear Giant (“Querido Gigante”) Albertina is a giantess in love. In love with another giant named Vivaldo, who has one peculiarity: it’s hard for him to stay awake. He sleeps all the time. To communicate with him, Albertina writes letters, which she sends through her faithful handmaid, Lucrecia. Lucrecia goes and comes with the letters, from one castle to the other and she hands them over to Vivaldo’s faithful footman, Atilio. Albertina desperately hopes that her letters will capture the attention of her beloved as she shares with him information about the world outside. Until the kingdom falls into the peril of a foreign invasion. Albertina and Vivaldo are the only two giants, only they can defend the two gates to the kingdom and its inhabitants. But Vivaldo won’t wake up and Albertina has to handle the situation on her own. In the end she will manage to avoid a war without resorting to any form of violence, using only her creativity. She will also find, in an unexpected twist, a true love, wide awake! Set in medieval times, this children’s novel, through humor and a strong yet loveable female character, tells of unrequited love and the courage it takes to never give up. But, most of all, it tells of the importance of being awake and not missing out on the amazing opportunities that life has to offer us.

Do You Have a Book About Witches? And Other Stories (“¿Tiene un libro de brujas? Y otros cuentos”) includes three stories of the love between different creatures. Of the love that is possible between creatures who are different.

The first story, “Do You Have a Book About Witches?” (“¿Tiene un libro de brujas?”) tells the tale of a spoiled girl whose mother goes to the bookstore looking for a book about witches. When the shopkeeper can’t find the book, the mother returns home with a real witch. She hopes that this witch will be able to make her daughter happy. But the witch does not make things easy. She is very grumpy and doesn’t want to talk to the little girl. Little by little, love begins to grow between them as the girl and the witch start to understand each other… a little… through the help of books.

The second story is called “Where is Rye?” (“¿Dónde está Centeno?”) it tells of a mother’s desperate attempt to protect her family from the pain a divorce might cause them. She brings home a dog. Even though she has never liked dogs at all, she would do anything to give her son the thing he’s always wanted most to help him get through a difficult time for the family. But it turns out that Rye, which is the dog’s name, gets lost… more precisely Rye runs away with Zunilda, a female dog from the neighborhood who was mistreated by her owner. Rye is with Zunilda but he misses his family. Alba is with her family but she desperately misses Rye. The love that brought them together, from different and unexpected places, could be the solution to their problems. And in the end they find the solution together.

 “Ducky Rodríguez” (“Patito Rodríguez”) tells of a very uptight duck, who doesn’t like anything to be out of place, who follows the same routine every day, at the same time, with the same expression and the same hairdo. A very organized duck. Until one day a girl duck appears. Brave is her name, and she turns his life upside down as she proposes new things, different things, other worlds, broader horizons. But love becomes possible when they realize they can remain true to themselves even though the other one is different.