It is 1873 in Santander, in the north of Spain. Magdalena and Juan are a married couple without many resources, whose desire to have children is not fulfilled. An miscarriage fractures their hopes and turns Magdalena into a sombre and uncomfortable figure. As the situation worsens, Juan decides to take his uncle at his word and they travel to the Jalisco Highlands in Mexico to change their future. This is the point of departure for a narrative that explores migration, revolutionary revolt, feminine subalternity and the resistance of the oppressed. From these threads, the perpetual wounds that will mark their descendants for generations to come, will take shape.
In the spirit of the new magical realism, with a sober and poetic language, surrounded by indigenous songs, prayers and incantations, In the Shade of a Dead Tree (“A la sombra de un árbol muerto”) tells of the life of those who face their destiny from the place they occupy long before they are born.

In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in Moscow to divide Poland between them. In The Polish Girl (“La niña polaca”), Mónica Rojas tells the story of Ania’s family, deported from their native village of Komarno, in eastern Poland, to a Siberian gulag. Suddenly everything they had known, all the rituals of life, a happy and intimate environment, are lost and replaced by hunger, forced labour and death. Ania turns 15 on the train that takes them to Siberia, where they spend almost two years felling and stripping trees in winter, working in temperatures as low as minus forty degrees, sleeping in barracks where no one knows if the person sleeping next to them will survive the night, and always exposed to the violence and malice of the guards.

It was in this hell that Ania meets again the image of Cezlaw, her first love, dissipated between reality and imagination. And where she meets the serene Olga, an old woman enslaved in the gulag, who spends her days telling stories and reciting poems. Thanks to these two people, Ania is able to endure life until the liberation of the Poles following the amnesty signed at the leather and mahogany desks of the world’s leaders.

And now? And afterwards?
After crossing deserts and oceans, Ania and her family find a new homeland: Mexico. What does Poland have to do with Mexico? For them, everything and nothing. More than eight decades later, Ania and the Polish survivors of the gulag give voice to those who did not survive, to those who lost their homeland forever. And they convey a vital and hopeful message: a new homeland, a new future, can be found by preserving the memory of that loss.

What do a poor boy, a rape, a boxing promoter, and an abandoned family have in common? In Mónica Rojas’ novel these are the elements that make up the dramatic story of Lobo. Lobo is the nickname of Lupe Quezada, the novel’s protagonist, in the boxing world. Lupe lives in Tijuana with his sister Diana and his alcoholic mother, who has not got over being abandoned by her husband. Diana is repeatedly raped at work by José Luis, her boss, and Lupe is not prepared to tolerate it. In a one-on-one fight, the strong, burly rapist dies under his furious blows. What Lupe doesn’t know is that José Luis is part of the city’s organised crime scene. Soon he feels persecuted. But Aníbal, the boss who would normally do a simple settling of scores, is also a boxing fanatic with an old dream. Fascinated by young Lupe’s prowess, he offers him a professional career under his patronage. The scrawny Lupe accepts without a second thought because he knows he owes him his life and sees in the proposal the possibility of having some prospects in the world for him and his sister. After years of training, Lupe’s rise is dazzling and Aníbal is proud. Their relationship resembles more and more that of father and son. Lupe is willing to do anything to please his benefactor, including dirty jobs. He is totally focused on his career. The young Celeste, initially paid by Aníbal to have sex with Lupe, soon becomes his mistress and even the mother of his child, but Lupe has no feelings for her. Everything gets complicated when Lobo and Aníbal’s fiancée Ana meet and Lobo has to decide between a few moments of happiness and love, versus his loyalty to Aníbal.
Mónica Rojas masterfully immerses us in a story of passionate confrontation, where the human condition of the protagonists, linked to the desire to be and to exist, leads us to live and suffer first-hand the feelings of each of the actors in this novel.

In the opening scene, Max Müller, a famous Swiss painter, lies unconscious on the floor of his studio in Zurich. Somebody has shot him with a nail gun. A few months earlier, Gottfried Messmer, owner of the Café Glück, receives his father’s legacy: a cane and a sealed letter put in a safety deposit box in a Swiss bank. The cane hides a valuable painting, “Inside the Forest”, and the letter, written in 1960 by his father Hermann, urges Gottfried to find its rightful owner: a Jew whom Hermann helped to enter Switzerland illegally in 1942, when the Confederation closed the border to those seeking refuge on racial grounds. But Gottfried is afraid of going over old ground. He had a complicated relationship with his father, who committed suicide when Gottfried was still a child. Therefore, he hangs the painting on the wall in his café. Soon several persons show an interest in the small work of art. Among them is his friend and regular client at the Café Glück, the painter Max, and an anonymous caller. The first suspects that his father was the owner of the painting, while the latter needs money and already has a buyer in the USA. Gottfried removes the painting from the wall, but only when the caller starts threatening him making allusions to Gottfried’s girlfriend Julia, he is ready to take action and finally fulfill his father’s wish. He comes to terms with him and his past, and also comes closer than ever to Julia, looking now to the future with an optimism that is unusual for him.

The novel is a caleidoscope of characters intertwined with each other in a complex and peculiar way, every detail of its construction is in place. In the process, the reader learns about the true role of Switzerland during the Second World War, the traffic in looted art and the origin of the numbered and dormant accounts. Inside the Forest (“El bosque en silencio”) fascinates the reader with a modern love story and a constantly increasing tension. Last but not least, it is a plea for the importance of memory and justice, of friendship and loyalty.