A Selection of Works

Summary of outstanding works

Kafka y la muñeca viajera (Kafka and the Traveling Doll) – A year before his death, Franz Kafka found in a park in Berlin a little girl crying over the loss of her doll. The writer reassured her that her doll had gone away and he, a doll postman, would have a letter from her the next day. For three weeks, Kafka wrote a daily letter to the girl and the story has become a legend in literature.

Campos de fresas (Strawberry Fields) – Luciana, a 17 year old girl, is in coma after taking an ecstasy pill. It is “the next day”. While her friends wonder what happened, Eloy, the boy who is in love with her, searches desperately for the drug pusher who sold her the pill to try and save her life. Only by analyzing the contents of the pill will the doctors know what they are facing. Luciana becomes a piece of news for the sensationalist press and in a few hours everything around her is in turmoil. Her parents, her younger sister, her best friend who suffers bulimia and needs her to fight against her disease, the doctors, the police searching for the drug pusher and the dealer he has to confront. In the meantime, Luciana is playing a chess game with Death.

Noche de Viernes (Friday Night) – Five very different young men meet at night to drink and hang around, dragging their emptiness and their own problems in a spiral that will lead them to challenge a group of skin heads and to kill an Arab boy in the early hours of the morning. The story is told through an innovative technique by which the voice of each one of the five main characters tells the story in the first person from his own point of view. The novel is a ruthless claim against violence amongst young people.

La piel de la memoria (The Skin of Memory) – Kalil Mtube is sold by his father for scarcely 15 dollars with the belief that he will be adopted by a family that will allow him to study and will give him a much better life. However, Kalil is snatched from the border between Mali and Burkina Faso where he lives. He is then condemned to live as a modern slave in the cocoa fields of the Ivory Coast. His life is hell until he manages to escape. However, he ends up in a ship where the children are thrown into the sea before the ship crew gets arrested by the authorities. This novel shows the cruelty against slave children in Africa in the twenty first century.

Aydin – In 1992, a little beluga whale escapes accidentally from a laboratory in Ukraine. Swimming on a straight line it arrives in Gerze, a Turkish village where it is adopted by the fishermen. The news becomes an international issue. Conservation groups want to buy it and release it, Turkey claims it belongs to them and Ukraine enforces its right of property. Aydin (which means “clarity” in Turkish) is taken back to Odessa, and then a year later escapes and returns to Gerze with the fishermen. This is a story for children.

Historia de un segundo (History of a Second) – Eliseo cannot read or write, and he helps a doctor in a town where, in summer, the rich from the capital and the members of the court come to “take the waters”. We are in the late nineteenth century. One Sunday he falls for a girl her age who goes to church with her parents, and she falls for him. One look. Not a word. She tears off a page of the book she is reading and drops it. On the page are underlined syllables. A message. Thanks to the village teacher, Eliseo will discover its contents. And he in turn will write another message for her. From now on, each week the two youngsters communicate in this way until Elena returns to the capital. Eliseo learns to read during the winter, waiting for the next summer… But Elena does not return, and he goes to town to look for her, once he has gathered all the torn pages and has understood that she is calling him. The love of a second can be worth a lifetime.

Las guerras de Diego – Una novela sobre seis siglos de historia en España (The Wars of Diego – A Novel about Six Centuries of Spanish History) – Diego is a boy whose life changes the day his father, a military man, goes with the Spanish Army on a humanitarian mission to a distant country. It’s time to get close to his paternal grandfather, a man who, in his youth, was an irreverent and pacifist hippy with ideas of his time and now is a lucid and special man, a radical anarchist with a sharp tongue. Grandfather and grandson seal a special alliance whereby once or twice per week they meet and talk about all the wars that have occurred in Spain from the times of the Catholic Monarchs to the present. This tries to show how stupid, bitter and interested wars are and what a terrible strife and how hard they have been to Spain over 500 years. In the intricacies of the narrative, the letters of the father, from a distance, weave in another bitter reality: the complex modern world. With mother and grandmother as witnesses to the strong oral narrative, always in dialogue through a constant flow of questions and answers, the novel becomes a perfect and visceral experience of the history of Spain. A history that should not be forgotten, because it has been repeated again and again over the years.

Trilogía de las Tierras (Trilogy of the Lands) – A not too distant future: humans and machines are equal before the Constitution. What is more, machines, that saved mankind from the Holocaust, are the engine of progress and social life. But when a man is charged with the murder of a machine, life is altered and the latent revolution is triggered. Hal Yakzuby, a scientist, defends the human accused of murder, and, with Balhissay, a 2-15 machine that knows the ins and outs of the story and the truth, they face an exciting trial that will determine the future of the planet. This is the start of …In a place called Earth, the first part of the Trilogy of the Lands, completed with Back to a Place Called Earth andThe Testament of a Place called Earth. Published in 1983 and 1986, these books quickly became a reference in Spanish sci-fi, and were gathered in a single volume 25 years later.

El Tiempo del Olvido (The Time of Oblivion) – An eighteen year old boy appears in a village in the Basque Country. He makes friends with Tetxu, the son of an ETA member who has been missing for ten years after killing a man by mistake. The friendship between the two boys grows and makes Tetxu to challenge his mother and find out his father’s whereabouts on the other side of the French border. When Tetxu tells his friend that he has seen his father, his friend goes after him too: he is the son of the man who died by mistake. He was holding his father’s hand that fatal morning. In an overwhelmingly emotional end, while his friend is trying to kill Tetxu’s father, he begs him not to do it, not to turn into the killer that he is not. The novel is about making peace, reconciliation, hope and friendship possible.

La música del viento (The Music of the Wind) – A group of tourists return from India with a carpet that they bought there. In one of the carpet’s hems, they find a note asking for help. The man’s cousin, a journalist collaborating with several non governmental organizations, goes to Madurai to face the shame of children making carpets with their tiny hands, led into slavery by the bazaar owners. This novel is a tribute to Iqbal Masih, a 12 year-old boy who was murdered by carpet manufacturers in Pakistan after leading a rebellion against them and winning the Reebok Award for human rights. Iqbal has a commemorative statue in Vitoria, Spain.

El niño que vivía en las estrellas (The Boy who Lived in the Stars) – A strange child that claims to come from space is found in town and taken to a psychiatrist. The child cannot stand the light, mimes shooting and tells strange space stories. The doctor finally discovers the truth: the child’s father had connected him to a virtual reality helmet and locked him up in his room to keep him out of the way. When the father dies and the batteries go flat, the child goes out for the first time. This plea against new technologies was a premonition of things to come, since after its publication, two similar cases happened in Italy and Spain.

En un lugar llamado guerra (In a Place Called War) – A young journalist is sent to a remote country, Tudzbestan, to cover a civil war. He hires a guide, a 12 year-old boy called Milo, who makes him famous by selling fake exclusive interviews with alleged war participants who are in fact the kid’s own relatives. Milo is a survivor. Nevertheless, between the reporter and the guide a friendship is born beyond the conflict, when they save each other’s lives. This novel was written before the invasion of Afghanistan, the 11thSeptember and the Iraq war, and its treatment of the issue is premonitory.

Un hombre con un tenedor en una tierra de sopas (A Man with a Fork in Soupland) – A well known Spanish photographer commits suicide after being awarded the World Press Photo. His younger brother, a student of journalism, wants to know why and looks into every clue to reach the Lacandona forest in Chiapas, Mexico, where he finds out that the award-winning photograph was the cause of a massive slaughter. The novel deals with the integrity of the media and their human and moral responsibilities.

La nueva tierra (The New Land) – In 1815 Spain sent the most powerful army that had ever crossed the Atlantic to quell the independence of the American colonies. One more of this army is Mateo Castells, 17, full of hope because he is going to fight for his king and his God. But once there, he realizes that war is horrible and loses faith in everything. He kills a Spaniard in order to save an Indian, who will in turn save Mateo. Together in the mountains, love changes their existence. But war continues and eventually Mateo must take sides. That’s how he ends up with Simón Bolivar fighting against Spanish troops. This novel is a song for freedom.

El fabuloso Mundo de las Letras (The Wonderful World of Letters) – Virgilio hates reading. Then, a writer visiting his school asks him to go to the library and fetch a book. The child gets trapped in the book and gets into The World of Letters, where he finds out everything that can be done with letters and the words that they form, from games to a thousand other curiosities. A reading and visual fantasy, built by its author with alphabets from the 16th to the 19th centuries, spilling with imagination and optimism. Virgilio meets great writers, who have retired to the Palace of Dreams, each one of them with a special type of unique letter, like the T-shirts of a basketball team.

El joven Lennon (The Young Lennon) – John Lennon was a teenager just like any other fifteen-year-old. He had a dream: his music. This dream would become the soundtrack of a whole generation. This novel recalls the story of the Beatles beginnings and ends when Lennon is 18. This is the story of a young man who believed in himself. A mirror.

Las chicas de alambre (The Wire Girls) – Jon Boix is a young journalist who is assigned a special job: To find a famous model who went missing ten years before. There were three of them who used to be called the Wire Girls because of their skinny bodies. Two of them died of anorexia and drug abuse and the third one simply disappeared. His search through Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, New York or Los Angeles reveals to the reader the entrails of the world of fashion, so desirable to the eyes of thousands of young girls throughout the world. Finally, the protagonist arrives in Aruba, a small island in the Caribbean Sea, where he will discover the ultimate truth.

Llamando a las puertas del cielo (Knocking on Heaven’s Door) – Silvia, a medical student, goes to India to work as a volunteer during the summer in a hospital located in a secluded place away from the world. She opposes her parents and her boyfriend, firmly, following her instincts and her heart, and makes a decision that will change her life and outlook. In India she knows the pain and suffering of those who have nothing, but also the joy of cooperation and peace of conscience, and she will be live not two, but three worlds: on the one hand Arturo, waiting for her in Spain, on the other Leo, a young doctor, volunteering like herself, able of sacrificing everything to be there, and finally Mahendra, the Hindu prince who keeps the most painful secrets and who will plunge Silvia into a new horizon without borders. With a long list of characters, memorable for their warmth and humanity, like little Viji and little Narayan, Doctor Roca, Doctor Giner and others,Knocking on Heaven’s Door is more than a novel that blends the exoticism of two cultures, it is the portrait of a generation, of a close yet distant world, and of the hope that we all have to help to make it a little better.

Una dulce historia de mariposas y libélulas (A Sweet Story of Butterflies and Dragonflies)Minghun has been practiced in China since the dawn of times: when a child dies another one is buried with him so that neither is alone in the afterlife. A father walks through the mountains for days looking for a dead girl. When he founds her, it takes him even longer to return, as he explains to the dead girl how happy she is going to be with his son.

Una (estupenda) historia de dragones y princesas – …más o menos (A (Great) Story of Dragons and Princesses – More or Less) – A writer sets out to write a classic tale of dragons, princesses, heroes, witches… but his conscience (or common sense) keeps interrupting him and saying that the story is outdated and that those stories are no longer read. The writer is determined to do it, but his conscience criticizes his work non-stop, paragraph by paragraph, laughing at him and calling him all sorts of ugly words. The story is full of humour, but the voice of conscience gives it an ironical and sharp counterpoint.

Material sensible – cuentos crueles (Sensitive material – Cruel Tales) and  Película vírgen – cuentos perversos (Virgin Film -Perverse Tales) – Two collections of hard, very hard, stories about the situation of childhood in the world.

El niño que se cayó en un agujero (The Boy Who Fell into a Hole) – Marc is walking alone down a street, when he falls into a hole and cannot get out. With half his body trapped in the ground, he sees several people pass by for two days, but no one believes him. Only a dog becomes his friend. Finally, a homeless man will provide him with the key to understand everything: the hole is his own depression, caused by his parents’ divorce. If he is not able to overcome it, Marc can end up like the homeless.

Los fuegos de la memoria (The Fires of Memory) – The bodies of several people have remained buried in the mountain since the end of the Spanish Civil War. When they dig them up… a body is missing. This leads a journalist to investigate what happened 70 years ago, at the same time a number of strange things start happening to the great-grandson of the man whose body has disappeared.

La isla del poeta (The Poet Island) – A 19-year-old boy who almost died during adolescence, travels from Spain to the Colombian Caribbean, to meet the poet whose books saved his own life. The poet lives in retirement on a small island, and hasn’t wanted to see or talk to anyone for 20 years. During one night, the two characters discover a new world of their own.

Poe – The Life of Edgar Allan Poe was traumatic but intense. The novel, built almost exclusively in 80 scenes and dialogues, tells the story of his life and portrays his literary and human value.

El soldado y la niña (The Soldier and the Girl) – A soldier in a war, any war, sees the bullet that is going to kill him. At that moment, a girl appears. She is death coming to fetch him. The soldier does not believe her and she says: “Oh, soldier, you have been tricked about this too”. Hand in hand with the girl, the soldier goes on a strange journey to corroborate the lies of war. He meets another teenage soldier who has been shot and is going to die, the generals who slaughter them just for their own glory, the politicians talking and talking without an end, the bankers increasing their fortunes. Finally, the bullet does not kill him and his life takes a new turn.

Las alas del sol (The Wings of the Sun) – In the early nineties, Yu is a Vietnamese child who has lived as a refugee for three years in Shek Kong, a refugee camp in Hong Kong, together with his family. The novel follows him on any day in his life, day 927, shows his hopes for the future and his present uncertainty, as well as his unrefrained energy, since, despite everything, Yu remains a child able to run and laugh. A child who gets up every morning before anybody else to watch the sun rising and stretch his wings above and beyond the camp’s wired fences. The reality of refugee children as a result of wars and other conflicts continues to be intense and tragic nowadays.

La casa vieja (The Old House) – A house living alone on a meadow sees how the city engulfs her. High skyscrapers despise her. Until one day, a group of men who seem to come to destroy it, in fact arrange it and turn it into an antique jewel, witness of a past that should be preserved.

En busca de la voces perdidas (Looking For the Lost Voices) – A kingdom which has forgotten how to talk after being in mourning for 100 years fins itself without words or letters. The king’s sons come back with new voices, but are unable to write. The king sends a blacksmith to learn how to do the figures and on a long journey the blacksmith will discover how to write A, B, C… and finally Z.

Mi primer libro de Ópera – 10 Óperas contadas para niños (My First Opera Book – 10 Operas for Children) – The author had to read 500 opera librettos to select 10 and rewrite them as children tales. A sample of his love for all forms of music.

El extraordinario Félix Feliz (The Extraordinary Félix Feliz) – Félix Happy Feliz arrives at his new home and instantly becomes the centre of attention of his neighbours, because he is an uncommon type: doesn’t  watch TV, is always happy, says hello, is friendly, does favours, even reads books! All neighbours will end up understanding Mr. Feliz.

Los hombres de las sillas (The Men with the Chairs) – A child sees seven men in black, each one of them carrying a chair. He is the only one who can see them. Every time the men sit down, something unfortunate happens. The child’s investigation leads him to discover a painting known as The TV watchers. Those men, like us sitting in front of the TV and watching tragedies, go out of the painting to see fatalities. The child discovers the love story of the painter and also the legend of his own village.

Rabia (Rage) – It is based on the experiences of the author, who always helps young people achieve their targets. The novel shows the end of Patricia’s adolescence, when the rage inside her does not allow her to understand her desires. She sings, composes, plays the guitar and writes. When she meets a writer who is visiting her school, she faces her own self. This work is a portrait of our current life and the struggle of thousands of youngsters to fulfil their dreams.

La fábrica de nubes (The Cloud Factory) – Pampelum is a country, but it is so small that it has no clouds. They have to be handmade. But one day, the factory runs out of white and grey paint and the person in charge decides to produce colour clouds. When they start coming out of the chimney everything changes.

Víctor Jara – Reventando los silencios (Víctor Jara – Busting Silences) – One of the most personal works of the author, that took him 25 years to write. It is a novel about the life of Víctor Jara, the singer-songwriter killed during the Chilean coup d’etat in 1973, which tells not only his personal story but that of a Chile massacred by violence. The technique is elaborate, based on dialogues and brief texts, and it conveys a clear impression of a time and a character who is now a legend. Víctor Jara’s widow did not change a single comma of the text before its publication.

Sin vuelta atrás (No Way Back) – A teenager kills himself. In the next hours the tragedy he was living is revealed; the bullying he was suffering, the beatings. The whole village suffers then the shock of this truth; his school, teachers, bullies, families, police…

Donde el viento da la vuelta (Where the Wind Turns Round) – Nino is 12 years old and is forced to join the guerrillas. He sees his friends dying, and takes part in war actions. But Nino can read and write, and while he fights, he reads a children’s book, his greatest and only treasure. Pure contrast. This novel is then the story of a guerrilla boy and the book that he is reading. When he is about to read the last chapter in his book, he is injured and must choose between crawling towards his weapon or towards his book. He takes the book. Years later, now a lawyer and defender of human rights, he recalls this story.

La memoria de los seres perdidos (Memories of the Lost Beings) – It took the author 15 years to write this story since he met the Plaza de Mayo mothers in. The protagonist is a 19 year-old girl of Argentinean father and Spanish mother, who is a member in a non governmental organization and is full of enthusiasm for life. A woman who claims to be her aunt visits her to reveal that the man she knows as her father is not her real father, but just the ex-officer who tortured and killed her real mother and then snatched her for himself. An intense plea for those who went missing in the Argentinean coup d’etat in 1976.

Donde esté mi corazón (Wherever My Heart Is) – What do you feel when you carry someone else’s heart? What when everything seems lost and suddenly a boy arrives? Montse has been about to die at 17, has lost her boyfriend, feels horrible for a scar that goes from her throat to her stomach. But love will make her feel alive once more, even if this boy… is truly who he claims to be?

Concierto en Sol Mayor (Concert in G Major) – A violinist infant prodigy arrives in his home town to give a concert. He escapes from the hotel to wander around the places he remembers and ends up with an old violinist who plays in the street for a few coins. It is first the old man who tells him about his love for music even if he failed to succeed. When the old man finds out who the child is after listening to him play, it is the child who tells him what music is for him. This is a beautiful story of love and fight, endurance and courage.

Las historias perdidas (The Lost Stories) – An old man, retired to the desert after his disappointment with the human race, comes across a dying man.  He doubts whether he should save him, since if he comes out to be good, everything will be all right, but if he comes out to be wicked, what he does will fall upon the old man’s conscience. The dying man then tells his story and the old man saves him. Some months later, out of irresistible curiosity, he goes to the Old Kingdom to find out what had happened. The man he saved is the Governor, who is leading the country to bankruptcy. The old man returns to the desert in desolation and finds another dying man. He doubts again. Then, after listening to the man’s story he saves him and some months later he visits again the Old Kingdom. The second man is the right hand of the first one and thanks to both men, the country is enjoying a time of prosperity. The old man goes back to the desert with joy. This is a story written with the epic tone of the great legends.

La bomba – una fábula en tres dimensiones (The Bomb – a Fable in Three Dimensions) – Three children find a buried bomb and play with it. In the novel, the story of the bomb and the story of each one of the children are interconnected. One of the children is Asian, another one is Central American and the third is an Arab. When they have the bomb, they play together, but separately we see that the girl lives somewhere in Asia, one boy lives in Central America and the other boy in Palestine. The story of each one of the children tells us about their lives and about the kind of war that left a bomb buried near their home. The author tries to tell us that there are bombs everywhere waiting for the children who, unaware of their destructive power, will play with them. The children, innocently, consider the bomb as their precious treasure, an alien craft or the legacy from their ancestors.

La guerra de mi hermano (My Brother’s War) – A young Spaniard is leaving in 24 hours to an Eastern country on an army humanitarian mission. The day before, at home, he has witnessed another kind of conflict: his father who’s proud of him, his mother who knows he is going to be killed, his pacifist brother who does not understand the sacrifice of the eldest, and the two youngest kids who do not care. War among them starts during the goodbye dinner.

Querido hijo: estás despedido (Dear Son: You are Fired) – A mother gives her son a redundancy letter. She is fed up with him and he has a month to find a new home. The boy laughs at all this, believing it is a joke, but a month later he finds himself in the street, with a suitcase and totally puzzled. He will then discover a completely different world.

El secreto de las perlas (The Secret of the Pearls) – There is no fish left in the sea and the village is dying of hunger. But one day a fisherman discovers a cavern full of pearls. After he has finished off the pearls, the very same day he finds another cave, he also comes across a fish bank. He will need to make a decision.

Los ojos del alma (The Eyes of the Soul) – Based upon the true story of Spain’s youngest paralympic champion in Athens 2004. A girl who dreams of becoming an Olympic medal-winner has to face a sudden blindness which sinks her. Only her coach, by encouraging her to take part into the Paralympic Games, will be able to save her life.

Historias de Medio Mundo (Stories from Half the World) – Stories written or collected during the many journeys of the author around the World.