Alaitz Leceaga's Top 3 Books

Shot towards success with her debut feature, Alaitz leceaga points to a leading author of the European literary scene. And the trick, as on other occasions, lies in the narrative imprint, in that differential fact to know how to tell great stories (also due to their volume), which for days accompany readers who are delighted to resume every free time the adventures and misadventures of intense characters and exciting events.

But, returning to the issue of the imprint, to be able to write extensive stories and maintain brio, a difficult balance is needed between pause and tension, between setting and action. alaitz Leceaga has manifested as a virtuous of that compensation also extended between substance and form.

What is the same, the patience of the writer on an action that seeks to rush and ends up contained for the glory of the story made life, a life extended to all the details.

Long novels provide a sort of combination of genres for the writer who dares to mix. When the mystery, the suspense, the enigmatic, is projected as a latent leitmotif at all times, its conjugation with more traditional, or magical, or even romantic aspects makes everything perfect. There moves an Alaitz Leceaga who aims very high.

Best novels by Alaitz Leceaga

To where the sea ends

Even today the sea has that mythical point of the unfathomable, of confusing infinity contradicted by a sense of sight that does seem to see the line where the sea closes. From the dichotomy between the unfathomable and the horizon to be conquered by sight, marine adventures were born, but also tragedies and odysseys. On the coasts there are always those who wait or those who receive the hopeful messages or, on the contrary, remains of any shipwreck, no matter how sinister.

1901. In the idyllic Basque town of Ea, Dylan and Ulises Morgan contemplate on the horizon how the Annabelle, the steam of his grandfather, after the terrible storm of the previous night. Later, the body of a young woman appears floating on the shore. Strangely, she is identical to another girl who disappeared many years ago, Cora Amara, the youngest daughter of the owner of the village funeral home.

Cora is not the only young woman who has never been seen again: several women from the surrounding small towns have been lost for years. The bodies have never been found, but the tide carries a wreath of white lilies ashore every time it happens.

As far as the sea ends is a passionate intrigue about family secrets, revenge and the redemptive power of love, set in the dramatic landscapes of the Vizcaya coast, a land of legends where you can still hear about mermaids.

The forest knows your name

The XNUMXth century is already a kind of consolidated past in its entirety. With that melancholic feeling of a deadline for life, this century becomes the place to find stories of all kinds. And those of us who occupy that time, to a greater or lesser extent, discover that yes, that part of us belongs to that scenario of no return.

And thanks to that misty idea of ​​a not-so-distant past, full of experiences or stories, legends or intra-histories, enigmas and mysteries, the author Alaitz Leceaga has known how to compose a novel that is impregnated with all those sensations that address us. with intensity. In a splendid house, on the wild and steep Cantabrian coast, live Estrella and Alma, two young women who sooner or later will have to take charge of the family heritage, the exploitation of a mine on which their ancestral family has been able to build a legacy with which the whole family prospers.

However, fatality soon appears in history as that kind of almost mystical compensation that usually seeks its collection among the happiness of a lineage, an enigmatic compensation converted into a family stigma. From the kind childhood of Estrella and Alma we delve deeper into the secrets of this family saga. As time passes and the situation changes completely, we will discover setbacks that the protagonist will have to face to maintain her family legacy. A novel that presents different scenarios.

Between the realism of the historical circumstances, especially hard for a woman determined to get ahead, and an esoteric touch that connects with the telluric, with the energy of the nearby forest. Among the darkness of the trees, where everything is dark and cold humidity, secrets lash in gusts, as the nearby waves do against the rocks. And it will be us as readers who discover what is housed in that shadowy space that always sheltered the lives of the Zuloaga family.

The daughters of the earth

For an adopted Riojan like me, discovering that the great literary discovery of the year is set in La Rioja to center its new plot, is always a great incentive. The thing about the wineries and their wines is something that pairs well with a plot around the heaviness of the earth as family roots, between customs, legacies, absences and strict rules of a family of ancestry.

Because of course, we are in 1889, a time when the meaning of family extended to possessions and businesses. And also a time in which the popular imagination built black legends that connected with supposed curses or atavistic blessings.

The Las Urracas estate suffers from one of those strange curses, although the worst of all seems to be the absence of the patriarch who was in charge of maintaining them until recently.

Gloria capitalizes on her father's inheritance over her sisters, at least in terms of the will to try to move the family forward in an environment that points to misery since decadence. But precisely thanks to that decaying space between the farm and the mansion, we are soon presented with invitations to great secrets capable of transforming the reality that is presented to us.

Mysteries that may need to be aired from each room of the great house, before the darkness ends up corroding everything. An arduous task is presented to Gloria, determined to confront everything, the possible ghosts and the other owners of farms and wineries who look at her with that feeling of intrusion of the feminine when she decided in those days to take matters into her own hands.

Ancestral curses of those days that end up being self-fulfilling prophecies. Unless the will, and the desire to escape from what is cursed, sweeps away all the fog of the past and prejudices.