Before turning 30, the Vitorian writer Alvaro Arbina has already achieved an impressive hat trick of great novels between historical fiction and the mystery genre. A bibliography that any other consolidated author on the national literary scene would like. And what's left…
Because in addition to her precociousness, Arbina has shown off that trade won by forced marches from the virtue of someone who discovers so soon a love for literature as a source of creativity.
If we add opportunity to ingenuity, the matter takes on that tint that points to a bestseller from the success of a theme that, seen other current explosives such as that of the novel 1793, shows that readers around the world are delighted with new historical fictions with a black or suspenseful component.
Not happy with his first two novels of this combined nature, Álvaro Arbina also delves into the purest thriller, in search of the twist, the tension, the frantic reading ...
Top 3 recommended novels by Álvaro Arbina
The symphony of time
Mixing enigmas of history with the equally mysterious vicissitudes of some characters makes up a winning set in a historical novel. It is only necessary that the substantial, the story and the style, accompany with grace.
And as Álvaro Arbina already demonstrated in his previous work The woman with the clock, style and narrative tension come standard. In the case of The Symphony of Time, a new great novel awaits us. Because the author distributes the plot as a magician does with playing cards. From the complementary scenarios to the great knot of the narrative proposal, everything slides with the tension and naturalness of some characters who play their role with that necessary authenticity towards reading empathy.
From the thriving Basque society to the whole of a nineteenth-century Europe that transits from times of darkness towards modernity and its social imbalances. The essential mechanism of progress, latent conflicts, small details that escape official history. The author feeds on all this to turn a historical period into an adventure towards the discovery of underlying truths, or also into a thriller where he suffers with the characters and enjoys a captivating reading, accompanied by a delicious setting.
The plot is full of small circumstances and transcendental scenarios in the merely historical, and that advance intertwining, with that narrative art that allows the crossing of magical scenes and that ends up functioning as a whole, like the perfect gear that transforms a novel into a bestseller .
Mysterious disappearances and socio-political economic struggles, scientific advances that point to great discoveries capable of changing everything, discoveries that amaze the reader and moments in which stopping reading is entirely impossible.
The feeling that History has advanced on many occasions through secrets and hidden interests always approaches us with signs of complete certainty. This novel invites us to a multitude of speculations about that time in which humanity was peering into its most hopeful and at the same time darker future, the XNUMXth century.
The loners
Registry changes always have their one. You may find readers delighted to venture into the new from an author you already follow or who judge the new in advance if you don't stick to familiar patterns. The truth is that the style, the handling of narrative tension, the agility with the precise brushstrokes of detail is an unmistakable virtue already in Arbina's work.
It's just about exploring new scenarios. And a purely suspense novel always makes you want to discover the performance of a young and surprising author. The point is that the novel starts without hot cloths, crime is presented to us in its most macabre expression in a kind of cabin in the woods made as a makeshift and strange slaughterhouse for 10 victims. And it is not that the 10 deceased have nothing in common. The truth is that they have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Whoever has engaged in such a sinister representation of evil has launched a disconcerting message: No one will be able to imagine the origin of their criminal animosity even remotely. Because each death is from a corner of the world. And because no one can imagine what the hell they are doing in that strange place in the middle of a lost forest. Police investigator Emeli Urquiza is as impressed as he is puzzled. The same as his partner for the case, a Francis Thurmond who willingly lends himself to help without belonging to the body.
As if from a gore revision of the criminal novels of confinement style Agatha Christie, our ingenuity will have to move in anticipation of that turn, without the possibility that any of the 10 locked in the cabin can say anything. Because they are dead, of course, and everything they can say can only be guessed or intuited from some signal lost in the blood and snow of the harshest winter ever imagined.
The woman with the clock
The arrival of Álvaro Arbina to the world of literature through the front door, with a historical novel prepared over the slow fire of the latent writer.
Because paradoxically for what usually happens with raw operas, Arbina, as a good architect knew how to arm himself with patience for the best end of the work. Giving it atmosphere and rhythm in a marvelous balance. A plot approached from the fronts of the Spanish War of Independence against the French Empire but also from the rear to serve a parallel branch. Thanks to this subplot, the story is loaded with suspense between political tricks that threatened Napoleon determined to make Europe a whole space subject to his designs.
Leaving from Vitoria in search of a blind thirst for revenge, we accompany Julián with his wonderful intra-history inserted in the faithful facts with narrative goldsmithing. And we reach the beginning of the end of the conflict, with the French soldiers imprisoned on the island of Cabrera as hostages throughout the war. A review of the hardest days once Emperor Napoleon's will to conquer was manifested. A war adventure that ends up composing one of those novels perfectly bound between history and suspense.
