David Nicholls (Eastleigh, United Kingdom, 1966) is one of the writers with the greatest talent for romantic comedies. As of 2024, his biography included various audiovisual adaptations and five pleasant and excellent novels, such as One day (2009), Us (who aspired to the 2014 Booker) and A pain so sweet (2019), but then Netflix came along with Always the same day and redoubled the phenomenon that had already been One day. On top of that, it coincided with the release of their latest title, It's here (Empúries; translated by Laia Font Mateu), which the author has come to present for the first time for Sant Jordi. Now, this story—traditional and entertaining—stars a hyper-efficient, divorced, urban editor and a depressed, traumatized science teacher obsessed with walking. The journey they share will perhaps plant a seed.

Toni Güell (Barcelona, ​​​​1979) reads every week – I have told him – a hundred opinion articles by national and international analysts due to his work as head of Opinion at ARA. Perhaps it was inevitable that concern for the direction of the world would be the guiding thread of his stories, which, with intelligence and wit, he takes towards political fiction and the literature of the unusual. Elephants (Empúries) is his literary debut and has earned him the 2024 Mercè Rodoreda Award. This Monday he will present it at the Ona bookstore (7 pm). His talent has burst the seams of an elephantine discretion.

More than a century after the excavations began, the Empúries site continues to provide surprises. This year's discovery was unique, not only because it is unprecedented in Empúries, but also because there have been very few similar finds in the whole of the Mediterranean. A Greek kitchen from the second half of the 6th century BC has been discovered, that is, from the foundational period of the neapolis, according to ACN. "We are talking about a kitchen with specific structures that we had never found before," says the head of the Archaeology Museum of Catalonia-Empúries, Marta Santos. It is made of baked clay and was made up of a stove (with a vault that has not been preserved) and a small hearth, which was fed with embers from the bottom. Apart from the structure, what makes it special is also the amount of culinary remains that archaeologists have found inside the room where it has been located. Mixed with the earth that covered them, and where pieces of Greek pottery have also appeared, Marta Santos explains that "thousands of cockle shells", remains of fish and fragments of bears have been found. From these lands, archaeologists have collected samples that have been sent to specialized laboratories to try to discover what dishes were prepared in this kitchen