Between the crime novel and suspense bordering on terror there is a very interesting space where new international writers play such as Shari lapena, with its domestic thrillers, or where others like Dennis Lehane. That's where one moves Monica Rouanet one of the most interesting in the national panorama in that palette of grays and darkness of the mistress. Because crime, violence or madness come from the same well from which to build arguments that are in tune but that can be forged in very disparate plots.
With some great best-selling book already under his belt, Rouanet captivates us from those plots in which the characters, all of them, are the ones who carry the suspense under their skin, giving it sinister significance, scratching pasts or inconceivable futures to the evidence of presents that weigh like endless sleepless nights. If we look at the current Spanish panorama, perhaps Victor of the Tree it can be a reference, a guideline on which to point to a trend or a shared scenography.
Top 3 recommended novels by Mónica Rouanet
Nothing important
The thriller that most frequently assaults us in the real world is undoubtedly that of gender violence that turns any home or simple coexistence into an unspeakable hell for the victims. Therefore, seeking empathy from fiction means going beyond cold statistics. In literature there can be an epic overcoming of any adverse situation. Or maybe not, and the moral is that there is always a lot left lost...
In the Madrid of the nineties, a young woman manages to survive what seems like a brutal attack of gender violence. The press and public opinion echo the news and, for days, nothing else is talked about. There are even those who claim that she was looking for it. When she finally wakes up from her coma, Minerva remembers absolutely nothing, not even her aggressor who, from that moment on, will mingle with her closest friends to become her shadow and remain by her side for years, waiting, despite the changes. social, the right time to finish your "self-order". But have things changed as much as we think? Has society finally stopped judging women who suffer attacks of this kind?
I can't hear the children play
What is truly inscrutable are the recesses of the mind. There is reality, always subjective, fiction as another level of the construct of our perception and finally the dreamlike as the hinges that make everything fit together in an almost imperceptible way. Literally, the psychiatric has a lot of play and juice. Because sanity or normality is just a click, a joke, a disruptive moment or a turning point away from madness or eccentricity.
Let them tell Alma, a protagonist who will take us into one of those labyrinths of the mind, between mirrors and shadows, towards tunnels that our subconscious ends up recognizing. Gloomy corridors where that disturbing sensation is awakened in which discerning any hint of truth becomes essential as an exit light.
After a serious car accident, Alma, a 17-year-old girl, suffers a shock post-traumatic and is admitted to a psychiatric clinic located in an old renovated building. There she lives with other inmates and their pathologies and crosses with some children whom only she can see. Little by little, the history of the building and its former occupants becomes entangled with Alma's reality and leads her to unravel dark secrets locked for years between the walls of the huge house and in her own mind.
Wake me up when september ends
The blackest of Rouanet's novels in its search for a possible victim. The idea of double lives, of suspicions about those who were always our family ..., The hidden plots of people to whom a cordiality and an ordinary life are associated beyond any doubt or blemish.
The trail of a young Spaniard vanishes through southern England after leaving a distress message on his mother's mobile phone. She, who has hardly left her small town on a few occasions, decides to go in search of him. A year ago, her husband disappeared in the calm waters of the Albufera and she is not willing to live an anguish like that again.
The Civil Guard found Antonio's boat adrift, with blood stains on its boards. Amparo is convinced that he died, but the gossip that roam the town rumors other things. Once in England, Amparo discovers that her husband can still be alive, be the cause of the death of a woman and be involved in a sordid plot full of intrigue.
Other recommended books by Mónica Rouanet..
Where the Streets Have No Name
With an evocative title for anyone who loves U2, this plot addresses with a hyperbolic but no less true vision, ultimately, the lies on which a family is often built. A shake-up to customs, good manners, appearances and the dead under the rugs...
María del Pilar González de Ayala is 35 years old when she runs away from her mother's home in the Salamanca neighborhood, fed up with a bitter, castrating and macho mother who has turned her into a social "invalid", truncating her love relationships and her aspiration to manage his father's clinic.
The accident suffered by him, along with his new partner and the murder of Gonzalo, the suitor who abandoned her on the eve of her wedding, are another motivation to start a life of her own under a new name: María González.
María suspects that her mother had a relationship with those deaths and, therefore, as an improvised detective, she will discover a whole network of lies that implicate her family, a prototype of that Madrid bourgeoisie that she buried and never recognized her support for Francoism with the arrival of the transition.
Thank you very much.