Translation Rights TQE / Should I Die Tomorrow

Ruben is a young painter who exhibits his work for the first time in Madrid in 1936 and manages to immediately sell his best painting. He does not, however, expect the affront of the buyer, Jerónimo de las Hoces, who ends up burning the canvas in his presence. When the outbreak of the war rushes everything on, Ruben is destined to the Republican Propaganda Service and meets viola player Marta Medina and her boyfriend Marcelo. The three of them will be soon destined to the Extremadura front at Breda, a town of great strategic value where the advance of Franco’s soldiers -trying to unite the southern area of the Peninsula with the north- could be stopped. But Breda is also the home of a peculiar landowner who enjoys art and who, sick with melancholy, has constructed a mysterious burial mound, a monumental mausoleum in memory of his deceased wife.

A framework of individual and collective destinies with special emphasis on the relationship between Marta and Ruben and on how art can become an unexpected refuge in the midst of barbarism.

Eugenio Fuentes was born in Montehermoso (Cáceres, Spain) in 1958. His novels have been awarded with the prizes Extremadura a la Creación and IX Alba/Prensa Canaria (this latter prize for El interior del bosque). He is the author of a collection of short stories, Vías muertas (Dead Tracks, 1997), and of a book of literary essays, La mitad de Occidente (Half of the West, 2003). Fuentes, however, finds himself among the Spanish crime fiction writers with international projection thanks to his private investigator, Ricado Cupido, the main character in his series of novels: La sangre de los ángeles (The Blood of Angels, 2001), Las manos del pianista (The Hands of the Pianist), Cuerpo a Cuerpo (One on One – Brigada 21 Prize to the best crime fiction novel written in Spanish in 2008), El interior del bosque (Inside the Forest), and Contrarreloj. Tusquets Editores has also published Venas de nieve (Veins of Snow), a brilliantly narrated story about the fight against fatality.