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.

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.

Taking the Helm (“Leme”) is the autofictional story of a toxic relationship. In her literary debut, Sá Fernandes deals with the domestic violence she herself experienced as a child at the hands of her stepfather Paulo. He moves in with her and her mother when Madalena is just six years old, and he dominates the lives of the two women for twelve years with his controlling behaviour and outbursts of rage. The aggression is directed above all against her mother, who does not succeed in freeing herself from this relationship for a long time. For Madalena this is hard to bear, she experiences the undermining of the pillars that sustain human relationships and the distortion of the roles of parents and children. She has no choice but to settle into loneliness to overcome her fear and anger, to find a place for herself in the family chaos, and to find comfort in small victories in everyday life.
Later, when she herself was already in danger of repeating her mother’s behavioural patterns in her own relationship, she manages to free herself from this downward spiral. After Paulo’s death, Madalena revisits those years in images of her memories, and she writes to free herself from her stepfather for good. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after the separation, which was then treated with medication. Sá Fernandes succeeds in creating a sensitive portrait of a dysfunctional family, an almost astonished look from a child’s perspective at the absurdity and grotesqueness of what happened. This book is a moment of literary glory and a powerful act of self-empowerment to find one’s own way back into life.

A puzzle book, a scrapbook, a notebook of memories, a collection of notes against the voracity of the present, a eulogy to what matters most in life, a self-questionnaire without definite answers about adulthood and the state of the world – this is Drift (“Deriva”). From nostalgic family holidays to the painful experience of sleeping in a bed with bedbugs; from the slow learning of loneliness to the hatred of wedding parties that seem more like carnivals; from the martyrdom of insomnia to the arduous negotiations between mother and daughters; from the blind navigation of social networks to the conciliatory power of literature; from the rediscovery of therapy to a reunion with a first love: Drift wanders through subjects as diverse and unexpected as the witty or sharp angle that Madalena Sá Fernandes chooses to approach them. A book that confirms the literary resourcefulness of a writer who, looking at herself and her surroundings, gives each reader a kind of reflection in the mirror.

In 1967, shortly before Agustín Fernández Mallo was born, his father, a man originally from a village in León, a veterinarian by profession and a firm believer in science and progress, embarked on a pioneering journey through the United States with the aim of bringing twenty cows on a plane to Galicia. Almost half a century later, it is the author who makes his own journey through the American heartland, trying to retrace his father’s steps before the latter loses his memory.
Atom Heart Mother (“Madre de corazón atómico”) traces almost a century of Spanish history through a web of family stories and legends, about anonymous people who lived through the civil war, the post-war period, the return of democracy, and the turn of the century. As the narrator states, “life writes the fiction that we would never dare to write”.
This is the most powerful novel by the Agustín Fernández Mallo at his best; his most personal and, at the same time, most universal book, a narrative that deals with the entire human condition, and proposes to understand death not as the end of a journey, but as a beginning, the last lesson of life of a loved one.

When the world falls apart, only love remains.

Venice, sometime in the 21st century. Humanity is unknowingly heading towards extinction as a couple wander through the city, oblivious to the signs that herald the end of society as we know it. He is a Latin teacher enjoying a sabbatical year; she is a writer working on a book that brings together all the different forms of love. Without knowing it, they are both destined to play a pivotal role in the new world that emerges from the collapse. The Book of All Loves (“El libro de todos los amores”) is a novel about love, the great subject that has preoccupied artists, scientists and thinkers since the dawn of time. Or rather, it is a book about the micro-loves that surround us, and an enquiry into the different dynamics that love adopts, both in the intimate sphere of the couple and in other aspects of public life such as politics, economics or science.

Playing with styles and genres, skilfully mixing fiction, poetry and essay, Agustín Fernández Mallo has written a fascinating philosophical novel that radically believes in hope from the dystopia of the present.

In his novel Limbo, Fernández Mallo takes the reader on a fascinating road trip. Looking for the enigmatic “Sound of the End”, a Spanish man and his Mexican girlfriend, a former kidnap victim, cross the United States from east to west coast. Meanwhile, two musicians have the chance of theirs lives to record a CD. But the producer’s house in Brittany seems to hide a terrible secret. Creating an exciting and poetic atmosphere, Fernández Mallo connects his characters as if they were in a net, taking his readers to a place in limbo where it is hard to tell the present from the past, one place from the other, life from death. But it isn’t mystery that grips us, but something far more disturbing: reality.

When Nocilla Dream, the first part of a trilogy that can be read separately, erupted energetically onto the Spanish literary scene, it attracted enormous interest for both critics and the general public alike. It is considered an ‘alternative’ or post-modern novel, with a lopsided narrative that neither begins, nor ends. This isn’t literature as we have hardly ever seen it before, but rather a sort of elaborate collage of extracts.

In Nocilla Experience, the second part of the trilogy, multiple voices are distributed throughout the 112 fragments that make up the novel, from Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy or Woody Allen’s Annie Hall to scientific theories by Newton and Einstein. Distinct excerpts interweave and begin to form a patchwork of coincidences and complementary snippets of information that expose the solitude of the protagonists. Absolutely anything can be narrative material; anything other than boredom.

The first part of Nocilla Lab tells the story of the birth of the trilogy through an internal monologue that develops into a stream of consciousness from the protagonist. After being knocked down by a motorbike during a trip in Thailand, Agustín Fernández Mallo was left bedridden for four weeks and had the opportunity to divulge his experiences in this tripartite account. Seven years later, when he travels with his girlfriend to Cerdena, they come across an old penitentiary that has been converted into an agri-tourism site. A memory of reading Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance in Portuguese and a ‘No entry’ sign bring the first part of the story to a close. In the second part, the author’s voice disappears and gives way to a fragmented account that is accompanied by a succession of drawings, sketches and quotes about some of the characters inside the penitentiary. The third part of the book is a succession of post poetic flashes and varied etymologies – both ironic and distant – aside tributes to García Márquez, Wittgenstein, and Duras. The language adopts almost the tone of a comic and finishes with an encounter between Enrique Vila-Matas and the author on an oil rig.

I Always Return to the Nipples and to Proposition 7 of the Tractatus (“Yo siempre regreso a los pezones y al punto 7 del Tractatus”) is an intelligent and enjoyable soliloquy on the subjects of this world, starting from the loss of love and spanning all the way to language and its limits, which are perhaps also the limits of our own experience.

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.

First published in 2000, Sinful Capão (“Capão Pecado”) marked an era and became one of the most talked about works of marginal literature.

In Sinful Capão, lives are worth very little, almost nothing. Everything is always hanging by a thread. As Ferréz writes, “the future is further ahead, much further ahead”. So far ahead that it’s often too late.
Rael is a teenager who wants to get away from the atrocious environment of violence in which he grew up. A dedicated son, he endeavours to get a good job. But his destiny is about to change when he falls in love with Paula, his friend’s girlfriend.

This book, which has already won over legions of readers in Brazil and around the world with its brutal and relentless story, is now in its sixth revised edition, with an afterword by Marcelino Freire. By narrating the dark underbelly of an utterly unequal society, where machismo and cruelty dictate the rules, this novel reveals its overwhelming force and its power to provoke new reflections.

Practical Handbook of Hatred (“Manual prático do ódio”) was called “a punch in the stomach” by the critics. It tells the story of Régis, Lúcio Fé and other favela dwellers, who can’t wait to pull off the big heist that will finally make them rich. They don’t care about harming those they live alongside, creating a world full of hatred and violence. In this drastic yet captivating novel, Ferréz shows the darkest and dirtiest sides of life in the favela.

Ferréz’ novel God Went Out For Lunch (“Deus foi almoçar”) is about the apparently calm life of the middle-aged public official Calixto. When he is left by his wife and his daughter, it could be a turning point for him. Although unable to adapt to his new situation, he cannot decide to take a new step either and stays trapped in a life that from the bottom of his heart he is longing to change. With this realistic and well-observed novel, Ferréz takes a close look at the Brazilian middle class for the first time.

The most important writer from the so-called marginal literature of Brazil, Ferréz, from São Paulo, makes his debut in the infantile-juvenile genre with Emerald Dawn (“Amanhecer Esmeralda”). In a beautifully illustrated edition, the author tells how the daily life of Emerald, a black girl and resident of a poor community, is being altered by gestures of love that improve her self-esteem. According to Ferréz, the character was inspired by a child who attended his lectures and impressed him with a haughtiness comparable to the great African nobles.

“Besides, you have to be constantly suspicious of your memories. In the end, recollections always contain a certain amount of invention, don’t they?”
How does one record the traces left by another person over the course of a lifetime: what becomes a memory and what is discarded? Here are twenty-four moments, photos that freeze for an instant the relationship between Vera and Cecilia, which began in a neighbourhood square when they were only three years old. Framed by the events that have shaken the country for several decades – the shadow of the Malvinas war and the dictatorship, economic crises, cultural changes – these scenes speak of the chiaroscuro of friendship. From childhood games, complicity and jealousy to first love experiences, couples, children, losses, fights and reunions. There is a family secret that is pursued. A mother who silences. Through these frozen moments, the author manages to allow the reader to see, literally, these two women who share their lives for fifty years.
24 Photos (“24 fotos”) is an exciting and agile novel, which establishes Andrea Ferrari as a writer for literature lovers of all ages.

“I’m ashamed of many things: my extremely long arms, my enormous feet, my ungainly body that I can’t even conceal with extra-large overalls. Also of the fact that my mum is pregnant (because who wants a little brother when they’re 14?). But most of all I’m ashamed of my face: a constellation of infinite pimples. So it was great when the world came to a halt with the pandemic and the all-covering face masks arrived. With my face hidden, I became a different person, someone capable of doing things I could never have imagined. Plus, I met Liz. And Melina: that was the best thing of all.
In Behind the Mask (“Detrás de la máscara”), Andrea Ferrari talks about the questions, insecurities, and decisions that arise during the teenage years: What do we show of ourselves? What do we want to hide? How do we face the gaze of others?”

The Picture of Verónica G. (“El retrato de Verónica G.”) refers to an advertising image of a beautiful young girl, Verónica, and its impact, told from the point of view of Lucía, one of her best friends. When Verónica is discovered as a model, her image invades the city, on billboards and in magazines. It provokes admiration and envy and even a ects Verónica’s relationships with her closest friends. They discuss the importance of appearance in all areas of life, and manipulation in the social media. They become distant, and when Verónica starts having problems with her boyfriend, she feels left alone. Society’s focus on the appearance is questioned by a growing group of people: at the same time that the photo makes Verónica famous, a women‘s movement in the world explodes against the mandate of traditional beauty. #fuckbeauty is the slogan that takes over the streets. In a dialogue with “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde, this sharp and contemporary novel for 14-year-olds speaks of the privileges associated with beauty and the humiliations of achieving it, captivating the reader until the very end of the novel, and beyond.

The Equals (“Las iguales”) is a story of twins, of how you live when you have someone who is almost the same as you… but not quite. At the age of 10 Vivi meets a boy, Luciano, and begins to feel the need to stop doing everything together with her sister Vicky. Vicky, on the other hand, doesn’t understand this and even feels offended, leading to conflict between the sisters. Alternating by chapters entitled “Vivi” and “Vicky” respectively, the story is told with the two voices of the twins as they speak to Marta, a psychologist who interviews them following an incident at school when Vicky posed as Vivi for an exam. The voices are as different as the girls’ personalities, who ultimately learn to love each other by recognizing each other’s different personalities. A novel that invites us to dive into the preferences and conflicts of two girls as they discover their identity.

Sol Linares is an atypical teenager. Cynical and lonely, she spent her childhood in the editorial office of a newspaper and always knew she would be a journalist. Her opportunity comes when, next to the hotel where a crowd of girls await the appearance of their favourite musician, she finds the body of a murdered man. With a harsh look at the world of journalism, The Speed of Music (“La velocidadde la música”), the first instalment of the series Sol by Night (“Sol de noche”), immerses its protagonist in the field of music and its fans to trace the motives for a crime. At the same time, Sol will begin to look into another, more disturbing mystery that lurks within her family. In The Signs of the Lie (“Las marcas de la mentira”), she faces the dubious circumstances surrounding her mother’s death, while in The Noise of Success (“El ruido del éxito”), Sol enters into the ups and downs of a loving relationship and discovers the truth of her family past.

Chimpanzees Look Into The Eye (“Los chimpancés miran a los ojos”) is a novel conceived with intelligence and sensitivity. It achieves what is so difficult for any narrator: to capture the reader’s attention from the beginning, and to keep him or her interested in the story both for the development of the plot and for the characters. The creation of a narrative voice in the first person, authentic and convincing, is one of the main successes of this work. But so is the accuracy of the story, the psychological intensity of each situation, and the carefully measured manner in which conflicts are presented. With this novel, the Argentinean author Andrea Ferrari shows again her narrative clairvoyance, which places her at the forefront of the writers of children’s and young people’s literature in her country.

Ana is fifteen years old and has a parallel life in a virtual world. There, she transforms into Ishara, a beautiful and tough warrior. But how long can she close her eyes to the secret hidden in her real life? A novel that shares techniques with cinema, Zoom immerses us in an agile plot in which the action moves forward and backward as if seen through a camera, which sometimes zooms in and finds the unexpected.

Francisco Méndez is fourteen years old, has an extraordinary intelligence and a passion: Sherlock Holmes books. Not only does he know more about the famous detective than anyone else, he also thinks like him. His family and friends expect his intellectual brilliance to make him famous, but these expectations burden Francisco, who doubts himself. In Sherlock’s Path (“El camino de Sherlock”), three strange murders of women in his neighbourhood serve as a test and lead Francisco down a fascinating path. Humour and police intrigue are combined in this magnificent novel.
In It’s Not Easy Being Watson (“No es fácil ser Watson”), Francisco Méndez dives into another case. This time it is his friend and assistant Arturo who tells the story. But this “Watson” brings with him his own anxieties, a difficult love affair and eternal doubts about his role as the second wheel, the slow one, the one who seems to be there only to let Sherlock’s mind shine. It’s just not easy being Watson.
After college, the paths of Francisco and Arturo – or Sherlock and Watson, according to their nicknames – seem about to go their separate ways. Unable to maintain a social life or get close to women, Francisco turns to his new job as a detective’s assistant. Arturo, on the other hand, just wants to enjoy the holidays in good company. But he can’t help being drawn into the events that shake his friend’s life: the case of a famous stolen painting that puts him in mortal danger, and the reappearance of the beautiful and disturbing Violet. Don’t Call Me Bond (“No me digas Bond”) is the last part of this trilogy.

Youth – and in particular adolescence – is an explosive, exuberant time. But being a kid during a dictatorship, like the one in Argentina in the 1970s, is a different game. It demands not only courage, but also a dose of mischief. The narrator of Valecuatro is in secondary school when the dictatorship errupts; however, nothing changes. Everything still seems normal. Until he perceives the terror that overwhelms the papier-mâché scenario set up by the authorities. And he discovers that, in addition to the challenges that beset every adolescent boy – his place in society, sex, love, a reality so unfair that it revolts – his situation entails other dangers. For the body, yes, but above all for the soul.

The title that gives the novel its name is an allusion to the most popular card game in Argentina: truco. When the “vale cuatro” is called, the bet reaches its limit. It doesn’t matter if at that moment you have an unbeatable play or just a couple of useless cards. What counts is the conviction with which the bluff is held, the firmness in the look, the decision to go all in even when you have little or nothing.

With humour and sensitivity, Marcelo Figueras’s new novel asks what happens when the world becomes frightening and, instead of ‘feigning insanity’, everyone feigns normality. In that emergency, even if bad cards are dealt, there is no choice but to find a way to win the game.

All Demons Are Here (“Todos los demonios están aquí”) is a fascinating story that combines narrative talent with some real events in recent Argentinian history. Tomás Pons is a histrionic psychiatrist, popular among his colleagues at the Alvear Hospital. Recently separated from the mother of his only child, with more outgoings than income and little prospect of improvement, he receives an offer he can’t refuse: a senior position at a private clinic he has never heard of, located on a remote island in the Tigre delta. The clinic is an old, well-kept mansion surrounded by lush vegetation. Patients wander through the garden and there seems to be a harmony, an unearthly tranquillity. Little by little, Pons begins to notice strange movements and witnesses extreme situations that are resolved with unusual violence. He also discovers inscriptions from Dante’s Divine Comedy on the walls. Questions are piling up: Who really owns the hospital? Why do they withhold information about the patients? What is the role of the beautiful Sophía, who seems to know all the institution’s secrets? With a devilish plot, the new novel by Marcelo Figueras is a fascinating literary adventure that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy.

In The Black Heart of Crime (“El negro corazón del crimen”), Figueras devotes himself to the Argentinean cult author of Irish descent Rodolfo Walsh (1927-1977), a true icon of Latin American literature. He reconstructs those months of investigation during which Walsh’s most emblematic book, Operation Massacre (“Operación Masacre”), was born. But he also narrates the transformation of that young man into the Rodolfo Walsh we know today: the writer committed to his time, with politics understood as the defence of the weak and oppressed, and journalism that tells what not everyone wants to hear and to know.

Buenos Aires, 1956. A heinous crime pushes a fiction writer to become a detective. That decision puts an end to the life he had lived until then: it turns him into a fugitive, drives him into the arms of a forbidden romance, questions everything he believes in and puts him face-to-face with death.

The boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred, as in Figueras’s novel. Because that terrible crime existed. And the writer-detective, too. In 1956 he was twenty-nine years old and began to call himself Rodolfo J. Walsh.

Operation Massacre is recognized as one of the foundational pieces of investigative journalism, a work of non-fiction literature, written 9 years before In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

Marcelo Figueras’s novel The King of Thorns (“El rey de los espinos”) is a fast-paced adventure novel that crosses the limits of the fantasy and science fiction genres. In 2019, a famous Argentine comic writer is killed by the Secret State Police. To the young gravedigger Milo’s amazement, at the funeral he recognizes four of the author’s characters, each apparently arising from another world and time. Together with Milo and his best friend Baba, the four try to find the author’s last unpublished manuscript, where all of them are supposed to meet for the first time. Did the author bring them all together in order to be resurrected? And what role is played by the author’s daughters, who fought against the dictatorial regime and disappeared without a trace? With strong and unique characters like these, Figueras develops an enthralling story that has more in common with our real world than we might think at first glance.

In Kamchatka, Marcelo Figueras tells the moving story of ten-year-old Harry whose parents are politically persecuted in the heat of 1980s Argentina. They take him to a house in the country, pretending to play a game and bravely trying to face a life deprived of everything they have known so far. In an attempt to escape a world gone mad, Harry seeks consolation in his imagination. In the end, though, all their precautions cannot save his parents… With simple but beautiful language and subliminal humour, Figueras draws the reader into the adolescent’s world.

The Warm-up Battle (“La batalla del calentamiento“) is a fairy tale-like story full of humour and spooky suspense. Pat and her daughter Miranda have been moving around until they meet Teo, who immediately falls in love with the beautiful Pat. But the three are by no means ordinary people: Miranda has magical powers, and Teo is a giant. And what exactly has Pat been running from? Did Miranda’s father really die as she claims?

“As silent as a fish,” they say of people who cannot or will not talk for whatever reason. And the protagonists of Marcelo Figuera’s latest work move through the novel like fish in an Aquarium: constrained in the prison of their own speechlessness. One of them is Ulises Rosso, who sets out for Israel to look for his children, which his wife has taken away from him. He feels like a monster who destroys all relationships, yet he is powerless to change his situation. Arrived in a country where he is taken for a Palestinian because of his skin colour and treated accordingly, Ulises meets the artist Irit Rosenblum  and falls in love. Her soul too has been caught up in a cocoon since she lost her husband in an Intifada attack. The two of them have no language in common, and yet they understand one another.

Parallel to this story we follow Miriam and David, a couple who spent years trying for a child, only to lose their baby after a premature birth. She withdraws into a world of fish, which swim around like her “fish child” in its amniotic fluid. The couple are drawn to the local aquarium over and over again – a habit that David keeps up even after his wife’s death, as a way to feel close to her.

And finally, the child Danny plays a role. Irit takes him in after he is found on the street. He plays dumb, rejects any physical contact and his only communication is through drawings, usually of fish. That gives Irit the idea of taking Danny to the aquarium – where they meet David. Like in a play driven along in acts by the individual characters, like in a waltz in three tempos, Figueras has written a novel as dramatic as it is accomplished. He sketches out his character’s inability, regardless of their sex, age or cultural origin, to express themselves in words, yet without refusing communication and loving understanding in itself.

A wonderful book, dramatic, moving, scarred by pain and loss, complex and intense, yet beyond the unhappy end it has a much more important message: that of hope!

Gus is considered the most troublesome cricket at school. The fact that his mother is the local mayor doesn’t make things any easier. Gus is also tormented by the fact that he doesn’t know his father, who left when he was very young. Fortunately, Gus has the generous affection of his grandfather, who also feeds his imagination with tales of crickets that have travelled far away; tales that feed his grandson’s desire for adventure and his need to know what has become of his father. The situation is complicated when the prosperous merchant Peake becomes ambitious for the post of mayor and decides to attack the mayoress at her weak point: her son. To defend Amanda, with whom he has fallen in love, Gus gets into a fight with Rolf, a fellow thug and Peake’s relative who is accidentally injured. Peake manages to put the mayor in the dilemma of having to accept the request to expel Gus from school. Then a curious character arrives in town, a giant cricket who travels the world on a motorbike, and Gus decides to go with him to save his mother from the trouble he has caused her. The two separate without having broken the isolation that makes them suffer.

The Burrow (“La madriguera”) begins at the Palacio Durazno, in present-day Montevideo. The media reports the discovery of human remains found during the extermination of rats that had invaded the building. Detective Archimedes B. Carson, immersed in a dull life of vice and deprivation, finally has a case that proves interesting. With the help of his lover, Ruth Goldwicz, daughter of Aaron, who was the most memorable administrator of the Palacio Durazno, he will begin to unravel the secret behind the mysterious skeleton. The investigation will take him further than he could ever have imagined, and the action will move to one of the most disastrous episodes in human history: the Holocaust.

In the sinister setting of the Shoah, a young Jewish man will try in vain to escape his fate in a concentration camp. In his desperate quest to stay alive, he will discover the darkest depths of his soul, becoming a Kapo, a Jewish traitor who serves his captors and subjugates his fellow Jews. The consequences of his actions will move the narrative through different scenarios, and its ramifications will reach Buenos Aires, where Mossad agents plan the kidnapping and transfer to Israel of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, finally returning to Montevideo to close the circle of history.

The beautiful Miss Mary is in despair. Should she surrender to the wooing of rich Burt Tracy and become his wife? Her father has confessed his fear of existence to her. He can no longer maintain the farm since an inexplicable epidemic is increasingly decimating his livestock. In the meantime she meets the attractive Andy Sullivan, however, there is a bounty placed on his head. He is linked to Burt Tracy by mutual hatred and Mary soon learns that it isn’t Andy who is the villain and things are not as they seem. This entertaining persiflage on the classic Western is penned by the dissident Lucas, the true protagonist of Si le digo le miento (“If I Tell You, I’m Lying”). Its purpose is to fight the boredom in his hiding place but also to guarantee the attention of the woman who provides him with food and is his only link with the outside world. The prank seems to work and it even gets to the point where Lucas cannot cope with Miss Mary’s erotic desires. But the increasingly pressing question is, who is actually using whom and with what intentions? Is Lucas’ situation really as perilous as his ex-girlfriend made it out to be when she blindfolded him and led him to his hide-out? Is the cellar in fact a refuge or rather a prison? One day the woman fails to show and Lucas very hesitantly tries to open the door. He finds it unlocked and the world outside is nothing like he expected.

Suspenseful, full of humour and with accurate side blows on various clichés as that of the macho, Milton Fornaro artfully interweaves two storylines and as always bears witness to Uruguay’s dictatorship.

Corpse needed – Useless without Experience (“Cadáver se necesita – Inútil sin experiencia”) is set in a South American country, ruled by corrupt military forces: a crooked private detective becomes the victim of an international intrigue, involving both Vatican and Mafia. Humour, sarcasm and suspense in a crime novel, which captivates from page one. The TV-series based on the book was nominated for the EMMY 2013.