Translation Rights TQE / The Empty Cementery

In the midst of their local festivities, the residents of Getxo discover the corpse of young and beautiful Anari and, screaming desperately above her, a foreigner whom she was supposed to run off with. The next day, in the bookstore belonging to Sancho Bordaberri, alias Samuel Esparta, two young boys want to use their savings to hire his services as a private investigator. They want to prove that the foreigner whom everyone wanted to lynch is actually innocent. Samuel will discover that many suitors and family members saw Anari that dreadful night, and the case will become complicated when his investigation comes into conflict with that of the police captain of Franco’s régime. As if that was not enough, he will stumble upon a persistent popular legend that he knew nothing about and which says that the graves of coastal cemeteries are emptied through the bottom and thus the corpses spilt out to sea, where lovers may meet again for all of eternity.

The second installment of the series starring bookstore owner and detective Samuel Esparta that Sólo un cuerpo más opened, El cementerio vacío establishes Pinilla also as a great writer of crime fiction.

Ramiro Pinilla was born in Bilbao in 1923. He won the Nadal Prize in 1960 and the National Prize of the Critics in 1961 with the novel Las ciegas hormigas (The Blind Ants), and was a finalist to the Planeta Prize in 1971 with Seno (Breast).  For almost three decades he voluntarily distanced himself from the publishing industry. During that time, Pinilla published his own works, such as En el tiempo de los tallos verdes (In the Age of Green Stems, 1969), Recuerda, oh recuerda (Remember, Oh Remember, 1974), Primeras historias de la Guerra interminable (The First Stories of the Never-ending War, 1977), La gran guerra de Doña Toda (The Great War of Mrs. Toda, 1978), Andanzas de Txiqui Baskardo (The Adventures of Txiqui Baskardo, 1980), Quince años (Fifteen Years, 1990), and Huesos (Bones, 1997). Pinilla returned to the publishing circuit with Verdes valles, Colinas rojas (Green Vallies, Red Hills), a trilogy made up of the novels La tierra convulsa (The Earth Trembles), Los cuerpos desnudos (Naked Bodies), and Las cenizas del hierro (Iron Ashes) that won the Euskadi Prize 2005, the National Critics Prize, and the National Prize for Narrative in 2006. That same year, Pinilla published La higuera (The Fig Tree), a novel about the Civil War, humiliation, and forgiveness that is currently being translated into several languages.