It was after a conversation with her eldest son that Ester Invernon (Mataró, 1973) decided to put all her eggs in the literature basket. "He had arrived home angry with the world, totally pre-teen, and I told him: 'Many days I don't like what I do and I put up with it,'" explains Invernon. That night she couldn't stop thinking about the phrase and, the next morning, while having breakfast, she announced to her family that she had decided to change her life. "I told them that in a year I would publish a book and I got to work on it," she recalls. Thus began the career of a writer who has already brought five novels to life – including Un estiu per estimar (La Campana, 2021) and Ningú ens va dir que seria fàcil (La Campana, 2023) – and has sold over 20,000 books. Her latest story, titled Després de tu, has now arrived in bookstores, and is disconnected from the Trilogia dels Albons which has established Invernon as a successful author in Catalan.

In literature, there is often a disdain for genres considered commercial or popular that has never existed in film, not even among pedantic snobs and sophisticated specialists. There are quite a few critics, academics, and journalists who specialize in literature, however, who adopt a somewhat condescending attitude whenever they read a detective novel, an adventure novel, a horror novel, or one with supernatural or thriller elements. As if Dumas and Stevenson weren't creators of incredible characters and worlds, as if Raymond Chandler's prose weren't among the best in 20th-century English, as if the terrifying Shirley Jackson and the visionary Stanislaw Lem weren't first-rate writers—in style and ideas. I mention these names, and I could mention so many others. These condescending readers are unaware that writing a genre novel is incredibly difficult.

As a general rule, first novels don't stray too far from their authors' lives. There's a natural tendency to begin by explaining what one has experienced firsthand, not always successfully. Exceptions aside –Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Nothing of Carmen Laforet either The watchman in the rye field of J.D. Salinger– these first contributions to literature do not usually have much literary interest because writers are not born, they are made.