For many who start their vacation period and want to rest with good books, the ideal would be to have, be, have a bookstore on the beach. That is the title that refers to a novel by Brenda Novak, published by Harper Collins, with a romantic and light touch, and with a suspense point. And it is that it presents how, eighteen months ago, Autumn Divac's husband has disappeared; So, one day she decides to spend the summer with her children in her hometown, a coastal town where she grew up and where she now seeks help and comfort from her mother and her aunt, who run a bookstore. But then a love from the past will resurface even with the dilemma of whether or not to be loyal to the husband who disappeared in Ukrainian espionage actions.
It is an example of sentimental adventure, together with the adventure of action, and that would take us to other novels that also mean a journey through time. Tony Gratacós, in Nobody knows (Destiny), gives voice to the disciple of the most powerful chronicler of the empire of Carlos V at the time of the first trip around the world, of the Magellan expedition, with the suspicion that he hides dark matters. This is how Diego de Soto will have to clarify it by traveling to Seville to collect data on overseas expeditions and thus complete his chronicles.
In this same plane of historical and maritime narrative, Balvanera (Edhasa), by Francisco Narla, stands out, the story of "a pious whore, a mute Indian, a disbelieving friar and that honest whoreson" who will try to steal the largest shipment in the history of the Indian fleet. Everything happens on the other side of the ocean, in the New World, for an empire where the sun does not set, in a Yucatan with great tropical rains. For his part, in Sota la mar salada (Rosa dels Vents), Sergi Caparrós takes us both to Cap de Creus and to the Barcelona of the twenties, in an atmosphere of antiquities trafficking following the discovery of a mysterious papyrus.
From this debutant we pass to the veteran Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who in El italiano (Alfaguara) weaves a story of love, sea and war recreating the years 1942 and 1943, when, during World War II, Italian combat divers attacked fourteen Allied ships in Gibraltar and the Bay of Algeciras. Thus, the protagonist, a young bookseller, finds one of those divers one morning while she is walking on the beach, and the act of helping him will change her life.
And precisely Pérez-Reverte provides a prologue to the book by R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (Zenda / Edhasa), which tells how a ship is shipwrecked on the reefs of a small island in the Pacific Ocean, leaving only three survivors. This circumstance will give rise to various adventures in which friendship, betrayal and death will be mixed, all seasoned with sharks, penguins, human skeletons or underwater caverns.
Well, from another island, but in a biographical key, wrote the Australian Charmian Clift, in Siren Songs (Gatopardo), where she tells that in 1954, she and her husband, the reporter George Johnston, left the comfort of their London home and they moved with their two children to a remote Greek island land, Kalymnos, initially to stay for a year, although they would stay for a decade. The place was populated by sponge fishermen and superstitious old women, all plunged into poverty, but also enjoying, albeit unconsciously, the splendor of a wild and beautiful nature that will give the author much literary play.
Likewise, we can move to The most remote island in the world (RBA), with the Valencian, born in 1984, Myriam Imedio, who recounts the adventures of a very particular psychologist, chosen to participate in a secret project capable of revolutionizing the analysis of human mind. But then a strange woman commits suicide in front of her on a bus and nothing is ever the same for the protagonist.
However, if we really want to know what Hell and paradise of the islands (El Desvelo) are like, let's turn to this book by Miguel Moreta-Lara, of Moroccan origin, which presents a collection of articles on ships and seas and women fighters. And speaking of this, let's stop at the novel The Flight of the Kite / El vol de l'estel (Salamandra ), by Laetitia Colombani, a best-selling author who shows us an India in which a girl helps save a woman who was about to of drowning in the sea and that he had decided to leave everything and go to spend a season in the Bay of Bengal.
And let's continue with exotic places with A shores of the sea / A la vora del mar (Salamandra / La Magrana), by Abdulrazak Gurnah. We meet here an old merchant who escapes from the island of Zanzibar, with a false passport. Thus, he will contact someone from social services, a poet expert in Swahili, in a small city by the sea, which uncovers a story of love and betrayal, displacement and litigation, originating long ago. A novel that, after its argument, contains great observations on racism, imperialism and the general ignorance of the African reality. Not in vain, the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, according to the jury, for his "moving description of the effects of colonialism and the history of refugees in the abyss between cultures and continents."
Also Rafael Tarradas Bultó, in El valle de los arcángeles (Espasa), makes us think of paradisiacal beaches when he tells us what happens to a man who has inherited a plantation in the Caribbean. From the Barcelona of 1864, this character, the son of a baron who lives in a Gothic palace, after overcoming his initial doubts, will decide to cross the pond; will coincide in a clipper with a woman who has fled from her surroundings – a beautiful maid who has been mistreated and is in misery –, and both will be destined to step on a land made up of sugar cane, where a series of murders will take place in the middle of a slave environment.
Already on a more local level, we can enjoy All the narrations of the Delta (Proa), by Sebastià Juan Arbó (Sant Carles de la Ràpita, 1902-Barcelona, 1984), a volume by the philologist Joan Antoni Forcadell that brings together all his short narrative, published in a scattered way in the press, about the singular and disappeared world that saw him born. They are tales where the life of the humble classes of this area of Tarragona is evoked, the exploitation, the loss of innocence, inserted in a whole human drama within a splendid framework.
In this sense, another great connoisseur of the lands he walks on is Xavier Moret, who in Mallorca, open all year round / Mallorca, obert tot l'any (Peninsula/Pòrtic), offers us a new image of the Balearic island, pointing to it as an authentic paradise that we have within our reach, despite its fame as a mere tourist destination. Of course, Mallorca is much more: a conjunction of beautiful landscapes and cities, with mountains and a spectacular coastline full of centuries-old olive trees, not to mention its truly intoxicating social and cultural aspects.
And to contrast, a story to leave us cold and combat the suffocating heat: Think like an iceberg (Gallo Nero), by Olivier Remaud, a philosopher whose work has focused on social fables and ways of life in the world. Icebergs, he says, are part of our lives, even though we see them as distant and inaccessible; moreover, we depend on them and, even, they constitute an antidote against our narcissism, he affirms, because by imagining them we can consider them as that which encloses the time of the Earth and the memory of our ancestors.
And it is that studying the ancient waters that surround us explains the evolution of the human being from its very beginning. To continue with non-fiction, few know more about such a matter than Lincoln Paine, who in The Sea and Civilization (Machado Libros) covers the history of the world through the maritime perspective, until addressing the way in which languages and cultures they spread through sea routes.
Closely linked to this, it is worth mentioning José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, who in Ulises's dream. The Mediterranean, from the Trojan War to the boats / El somni d'Ulisses. La Mediterrània, from the Troian War to the pateres (Taurus / Rosa dels Vents) studies the sea that has been the cradle of encounters, myths and battles, to understand European culture and the current drama of those fleeing from Africa.
Likewise, it is worth remembering a classic of reference, from 1994, by Alain Corbin, The territory of the void. The West and the invention of the beach (1750-1840) (Mondadori). His conclusion was that the beaches were not a safe place as the border of the earth, but around 1750, a new naturalistic theological vision would be born, no longer catastrophic.
And speaking of recoveries, let's go back to Ojos de agua / Ulls d'aigua (Siruela / Columna), from 2006. A good opportunity to pay tribute to Domingo Villar, who disappeared this year. It is a thriller set on the Galician coast; In a residential tower a saxophonist has been found murdered and a police inspector will have to go into the jazz clubs to unravel the enigma.
Also, let's remember Chesil Beach / A la platja de Chesil (Anagrama / La Butxaca) by Ian McEwan, with a couple who spend their wedding night in a hotel next to a beach. What happens that night will talk about what love and sexual relationships are like, but also about the background of an era, the sixties, full of taboos.
From another equally well-known author comes a new edition of La playa / La platja (Altamarea / Columna): Cesare Pavese. It tells of the visit of a man who is reunited with an old friend, which will take them back to the places of their youth, such as the beaches of Liguria. And finally, let's look at the horizon presented by Antonio Iturbe in La playa infinite (Seix Barral), with a protagonist who, after twenty years abroad, returns to the neighborhood where he grew up, Barceloneta, where he will see how his nostalgic memories collide with a reality, tourist becoming.
