Another one of those great versatile authors of the literary scene in Spanish is Empar Fernandez. Perhaps it is a matter of that dedication to novelism in a parallel way to other professional activities, the point is that in his prolific dedication to the profession of writing, Empar Fernández addresses the historical fiction or the black-cop with ease and solvency.
Initiated in the black genre, her current literary career moves in that always surprising and enriching ambivalence. A creative capacity that, on the other hand, has been recognized with many awards.
Literary awards, honeys of glory that he was already able to taste with his debut work, winner of the XXV Cáceres Prize. A good omen that led her to today with that bibliography already consolidated. But she Empar is also well known for her journalistic collaborations. We can read some of the interesting articles from her in the online newspaper Huffingtonpost.
Top 3 recommended novels by Empar Fernández
The spring epidemic
"The revolution will be feminist or it will not be" a phrase inspired by Ché Guevara that I bring up and that should be understood in the case of this novel as a necessary historical reconsideration of the figure of women.
History is what it is, but almost always has been written omitting the part of responsibility corresponding to women. Because not a few fundamental movements of freedom and equality have been narrated in a female voice, serving as the maximum example of that egalitarian desire of each other. There is still a long way to go.
But what less than starting from literature, composing novels that reveal both heroes and heroines from other times when feminism sounded as utopian as the most necessary of revolutionary horizons.
The First World War left aside a neutral Spain on which nothing seemed to go in the conflict. Only that every war ends up splashing its violence, poverty and misery to an environment as close as Spain was, surrounded by countries that did participate such as France or Portugal.
The history of wars teaches us that the worst of all conflicts comes when the end is near. All of Europe was devastated back in 1918 and to make matters worse, the Spanish flu took advantage of the movement of troops and the deplorable food to attack the most painted.
Between hardships and fronts, we meet Gracia from Barcelona, a proactive revolutionary woman. The city of Barcelona lived those days transformed into a hotbed where riots were brewing and where the most hidden tasks of espionage were carried out. And it is for all this that Gracia is forced to leave her city.
Leaving Spain towards the north in the middle of the war did not augur a better destiny. But Gracia found in Bordeaux a passionate story of love, loyalty and hope, amid the shadows of a decaying world that seemed destined to be consumed like paper on fire.
With an aftertaste of romantic epic similar to that of the recent novel The summer before the war, and with the necessary doses of idealism of any protest novel, we find an exciting book, with a brilliant rhythm of accurate descriptive brushstrokes, to make us live in that dark continental awakening to the twentieth century.
Hotel Lutetia
A great novel that plays with the powerful contrast of war and love. A plot device that, with Empar's ability to stage with precision while introducing us to this sort of intrahistory, ends up serving the final effect of the novel.
The fate of the Riberas has been related to us since the end of the Second World War. Andreu and Rosa are meant as the paradigm of millions of traumatic separations. And the author is capable of concentrating all that intensity of the human crisis in this couple.
Because what was before and after that fundamental moment is being told to us at the convenience of the greater intensity of the plot. We are then located in 1969 and it is André who, like us, will seek answers to those existential doubts that approach one when he knows that the past is a sinister haze.
In the composition of the truth that leaps from time to time, the Lutecia hotel takes on the relevance of the most precious moments between fear, despair and even unspeakable secrets. Much of what André is today part of old plans, long kisses between tears, moments like echoes coming from a room in that enigmatic hotel.
The woman who did not get off the plane
We change the register and we dive into a very particular thriller. It is just a traveler who decides to get a suitcase that is not his. There is no one left in the terminal and the suitcase passes again and again waiting for anyone. How to build a suspense novel based on this simple fact of someone who decides to steal what is not his? Very simple, and very complex at the same time.
All part of the fault, of that intrusion that is the fact that Álex Bernal opens the suitcase looking for something of value to finally face that feeling of being in debt to someone beyond the initial guilt that already takes him on his head.
Because Sara's suitcase contains clues, snippets of her life, secrets that dot Alex with the sudden need for compensation from someone else who has become very close to disposing of his belongings.
A strange circle closes between these two protagonists, a game that started as something improvised but ends up emerging as an inalienable plan, a challenge for souls as empty as Álex and Sara's.
Other recommended books by Empar Fernández
Fear in the body
A crime novel in the style of Empar Fernández. In other words, with more human and even sociological foundations. The moment when that fear enters the body, when the alarm goes off, when the time spent without seeing your child becomes a disturbing doubt... And what can happen to life when yes, fatality It has come through the most dismal misfortune.
A child plays in a park in the center of Barcelona, kicking a red ball. Due to his mother's carelessness, the child disappears. Where has he gone? Has it been lost or has someone taken it? Why are his parents so nervous?
They are because that child, Daniel, is different from the others. He is autistic and, therefore, lacks the tools that perhaps other children would have, in the same situation, to ask for help in a populous city that is sometimes indifferent, sometimes lurking and almost always full of danger.
Soon Inspector Tedesco, motivated by a personal interest, sets out on the trail of the lost child. What he does not know is that this case, apparently unique and isolated, will confront him with an organized criminal plot responsible for more child abductions.
Fear in the Body is a novel in which suspense advances and hangs over the protagonists and the readers themselves, making them hold their breath until they are almost gripped, but which also demonstrates great empathy, even tenderness, while shining in many of the characteristic themes of the author: a deeply human social vision, understanding and open-mindedness towards others, no matter how different they may be, the globalization and trivialization of evil and how, above all, and only sometimes, solidarity and humanity manages to move forward.
