Philologist and former member of the Congress of Deputies for En Comú Podemos, Mar García Puig (Barcelona, 1977) surprised a lot with his first book, The history of vertebrates –which received the Ciutat de Barcelona Award in the essay, humanities, and history categories–, where she openly shared her experience with the little-explored connection between motherhood and mental health. Two years later, the Barcelona-born author has captivated Marta Orriols with his second book, This is so scary, published, like its predecessor, by La Magrana.

I'm arriving in July feeling short on energy. It's been an intense year, and this week I wanted to write something light, something that wouldn't require too much emotional effort. But karma literary had other plans for me and it has come into my hands the latest novel by the Valencian writer Enric Pardo i Ramírez, The man of the house, published by La Magrana.

The visit of a clumsy and insistent encyclopedia salesman who ends up asking for the man of the house, even though there is no one in that home anymore, marks the beginning of the first novel by Enric Pardo (Castellón de la Plana, 1977) written in a rich and intimate Valencian. Broiled rice, Look what you've done and Lost faggot, Pardo has needed to reconstruct his childhood and remember how his obsession with fictional worlds – literary, cinematic and comics – was born in The man of the house (La Magrana, 2025), a naked, emotional and at times uncomfortable testimony about the difficult and defective construction of a child in the 1980s.

This is the last novel translated into Catalan by the winner of the last Nobel Prize for Literature, South Korean writer Han KangA book that relates to all of the author's books, but especially to Human acts, because it also delves—with as much force as delicacy—into the traumatic past of Korean history. In this case, the bloody episode at the heart of it all is a massacre that took place on Jeju Island, in the northernmost part of the country, in which more than ten thousand people were murdered. It was a true barbarity perpetrated by police and military personnel against a popular uprising of peasants who rejected the division of Korea into two countries. It was 1948, and some historians place this episode as one of the preludes to the Korean War, which began two years later. Needless to say, the entire massacre took place with the knowledge of the US Army, which already controlled the territory.