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Elisabeth Ginger | @elisabeth_ginger_
Sometimes books arrive at the right time, when life gets messy and we need to understand that love does not leave, it only changes form. That’s how it is A lifeof Alejandro Palomas. A novel written from the deepest love, which says goodbye without breaking.
The novel, published by Ediciones Destination, is part of the tetralogy initiated with A motherfollowed by A dog and a love.. In this last installment, Alejandro Palomas takes us to the most intimate nucleus of one of the most beloved families of contemporary narrative: that of Amalia and their three children – Fer, Emma and Silvia – an imperfect and disorderly family, who wants to be strong even if he does not always say it.
Amalia, the mother who intuits everything and names him without filters, receives a diagnosis that changes everything. What begins as a medical suspicion becomes a journey to the essential: who we are, what sustains us when the ground trembles and what is made that love that remains even when life fits. And that is when the children take care of those who always held them.
Narrated again through the voice of Fer, the son who has been the thread of the whole saga, the story reunites us with Emma, with Silvia and with that network of clumsy and real affections that so many times reflect what we are like readers. In a life there are also two new characters, Mauro and Anca, who provide light and care in the middle of the tremor, adding new layers of tenderness to history.
Alejandro Palomas writes from a place where emotion is not resource but territory
Alejandro Palomas writes from a place where emotion is not resource but territory. His style, recognizable and honest, ranges between subtle humor and the deepest melancholy. His are not complex plots or dramatic turn; His is the beat, the shared wound, the silences that say more than the words. There is a brutal delicacy in its way of narrating the everyday. And also a clear will: dignify the small, the vulnerable, what is not said but feels.
A life is also a tribute to mothers. To those who are. And those who no longer, but continue to live in gestures, in the inherited phrases, in the silences they warm. It is a farewell written from love, but also from the acceptance that there are goodbyes that are not rupture, but transformation.
The book can be read separately, but it would be unfair to do it without having traveled the full path. Because part of the emotional force of this novel resides in everything that comes before: complicities, wounds, shared laughter. Reading it without knowing the previous books is like entering at the end of a long and beautiful conversation: it can be understood, but it does not feel the same.
Alejandro Palomas – traded to more than a dozen languages and with a strong presence in countries such as Spain, Mexico, Italy or Argentina – has managed to build not only an unforgettable literary family, but a universe where love, loss and memory are treated with a disarming humanity. Since he received the Nadal Prize in 2018 for a love, his name has become a synonym for literary refuge for many readers.
Con A lifethat shelter is still intact. More mature, more serene, perhaps sadder, but equally bright. And with the implicit promise that, even when everything changes, the essential remains.
Alejandro Palomas
Alejandro Palomas (Barcelona, 1967) has a degree in English Philology and has a poetic master’s degree from the New College in California. He has combined fiction writing with poetry and the translation of important authors. As a novelist he is the author of a mother, a dog, a love (Nadal 2018) and a life, the series of novels starring Amalia with which he portrays a family that has fallen in love with thousands of readers. He is also the author of works such as the soul of the world or the time that unites us, of the testimony this is not said and of the youth novel the day my sister wanted to fly. In 2016, his novel a son received the National Prize for Youth Literature. His work, taken to the theater and soon to the cinema, has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Synopsis of a life
Amalia returns. A mother returns.
The closure of a universe that has conquered more than 150,000 readers. 2nd edition
How much does a mother know? How much is silent, how much does it say, how much lies? While mothers live, children are children above all: more children than brothers, more than husbands, more than parents. We hang from our mothers like the climber of your carabiner, no matter age, no matter the distance. If even their deaths send their genes, after his death he sends the absence. “If mom saw me …”, “Mom will be laughing, sure,” “What would Mom of this think?” We talk to them when nobody looks at us, because we know they are, even if we don’t see them. We know they are eternal.
The afternoon when Fer, Emma and Silvia lead their mother to the emergency room, afflicted with what seems like a slight infection, do not imagine that life has arranged for them a totally unexpected scenario. When leaving the hospital after brief income, the family landscape is another: the three brothers make the force into children and caregivers while preparing for the possible orphanhood that perhaps will leave behind a being so eccentric and irreplaceable as Amalia.
With its excellent emotional prose, Alejandro Palomas closes the narrative universe that began with a mother and who continued with a dog and a love, and that he shows us again with an intense, vibrant and full of life text in his best version.
Technical file
Themes literary novel, psychology, family therapy
Publication 22 Jan 2025
Áncora & Delfín Collection
Rustic presentation with flaps
Amalia series series
13.3 x 23 cm format
Editorial Ediciones Destination
ISBN 978-84-233-6673-6
Pages 408
