Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​1965) is a novelist who possesses the virtues of audacity and a keen sense of timing. This, I believe, is undeniable, regardless of whether you like his novels or not. When I say he has the virtue of audacity, I mean that he conceives narrative projects that are grand in both ambition and capacity to surprise, and that he dares to attempt to execute them without resorting to specious precautions or reining in his imagination. And when I say he has the virtue of a keen sense of timing, I mean that he knows how to read the signs and interests of each historical moment and, with a threefold literary, political, and anthropological perspective, knows how to incorporate them into his novels. He demonstrated this with Victus and the commemoration of the tercentenary of the fall of Barcelona against the Bourbon troops in the War of the Spanish Succession. He demonstrated this with The monster of Saint Helena and the desire to reinterpret reality through the lens of feminist justice that sparked the Me Too movementAnd he proves it again now with After the shipwreck and the vengeful resentment and the miasma of disappointment and shame that the failure of the independence process has instilled in Catalan society.

"Sometimes people tell me I write books like they used to, and I think they're just like they always were," he said this afternoon. Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​1965) at the Museu Marítim, the chosen venue to present After the shipwreckThis is the first novel he has published with Univers – an imprint of Abacus Futur – after 25 years with La Campana. Despite changing literary trends and generational shifts, Sánchez Piñol remains faithful to the adventure novels that shaped him as a child and allowed him, thanks to Cold skin (La Campana, 2002), achieved unprecedented success in Catalan literature. If that novel, set on a remote island, had echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson, in Pandora in the Congo (The Bell, 2005) resonated within it Joseph Conrad, which has appeared in other books by the author. In After the shipwreckThe tribute is another great classic of the 19th century, Herman Melville