Grandparents in books. A tribute to the relationships between grandchildren and grandparents.

An elderly man stands at the stern of a boat. In his arms, he holds a light suitcase and an even lighter child. The old man is named Linh. He is the only one who knows it, because the rest of the people who knew are now dead.

This touching story speaks of exile, loneliness, the struggle to preserve identity, and, friendship, and it does so through the experiences and feelings of an elderly man fleeing from the war that has destroyed his family and village.

Mr. Linh disembarks in a country that could be France, where he doesn't know the language and where he would be completely alone if not for Sang Diu, who sleeps to the lullaby that has accompanied his family for generations, and Mr. Bark.

José González’s novel emerged from a text he wrote years ago and gifted to his grandfather for his 90th birthday. Upon revisiting it, he removed passages and added things heard from family and friends that led him to want to return to it: to his grandfather and to the text as a link between them. Tú también vencerás is born from the need to narrate to overcome loss, to resume a conversation, and to imagine a hug not given. Starting from a memory on the border of oblivion and an episode that connects the two generations, the work is conceived as a monologue. With it, he addresses an absent grandfather, thus creating a sort of interrupted dialogue, as described by his editor in an interview with the author. It is a brief novel «about guilt, affections, and an ancient world about to disappear. But it's also about collective memory and the recollection of a wild time that never quite passes,» as described in the synopsis by the publisher Las Afueras.

Bárbara Montes has drawn from her family's history to weave this story in which a granddaughter and a grandmother share their past and present while seeking in each other their lifeline. Sofía is a recently divorced woman in her thirties who decides to go live with her grandmother so she can take care of her while saving on rent. The increasingly ill grandmother desires to narrate her story, and the granddaughter discovers that she needs to hear that account. With tenderness, sadness, and humor, Montes speaks in Julia está bien about generational failures, bravery, and true loves.

Chris Pueyo dedicates this book to his grandmother because he wants her to live forever within it. He sits with her and asks her to tell him her story. He listens, intervenes, asks questions, and builds bridges between what she lived through and his own experiences.

He jumps from his grandmother's memories (in which he yields the floor to her) to his own and to what they share in a succession of chapters, seemingly disorderly but well articulated, where Pueyo pours out the complicity between them and also moments of pain, sadness, courage, overcoming, and above all, much love. "I like to think that writing about my grandmother to keep her away from death is a beautiful love story [...]," says this writer who has intertwined two biographies in a book he defines as: "[...] a journey for adults meant for the young. Or, better said, a journey for adults and young people who don't mind growing old while reading.

An old Calabrian peasant settles in his son's house in Milan: he is sick and needs medical care. He reluctantly goes to the city; the only thing that truly drives him to make the effort is that he sees in this journey his only chance to live a little longer than one of his neighbors. He wants to allow himself the pleasure of being the one attending his enemy's funeral, not the other way around.

But in Milan, he discovers his grandson, Brunettino, and with him, he rediscovers himself. That robust and gruff man, sometimes grumpy and distrustful - splendidly depicted with José Luis Sampedro's writing - has a wonderful capacity for love and dedication; for enjoying details like the child's evening bath, and for becoming an accomplice and promoter of discoveries, breaking the rules that need to be broken.

The special relationship with his grandson gives more meaning to his days than that old and resentful rivalry between neighbors. Now, the old partisan feels, above all, like a grandfather, nonno, and that is what holds him to life. La sonrisa etrusca is a novel about love -not just towards the child, a woman is also present- where there is no room for sentimentality but there is room for infinite tenderness.