I would not want in any way to be in the shoes of any of those authors who triumph with their first published book –I certainly do not dream of being resurrected like Carmen Laforet–, because the expectations generated are so high that it is very difficult not to fail. Although the success that the writer Alana S. Portero (Madrid, 1978) obtained with her first novel, La mala costumbre, was more than justified, now the publication of her second, Cosamala, puts her in a complicated position. Will the author validate her triumph or will she crash?

There are novels that feed on chilling real crimes and, by narrating them, bring them back to the table to show the horror the victims suffered. Cosamala (Seix Barral), by Alana S. Portero (Madrid, 1978), goes a little further, because it transcends denunciation through recreation and transformation, thanks to a prose of precise and unsettling beauty, of an episode of the Spanish Civil War experienced in Guillena, a municipality located about 20 km north of Seville. An episode that still shakes everyone who hears about it today, both for its brutality and for the chronological proximity of its discovery.