Les terres promeses

Spanish, Ediciones B

***Sant Joan Novel Award 2010***

«The best Barril—that of the wise look, gentle, understanding, with which it is able to understand and love people; their dreams, the effect of the passage of time… Pure human chemistry.» Vicenç Villatoro

«A historical fresco of the 20^th century: from major disasters and from its hopes and contradictions. A deep reflection on individual causes and the great collective cause.» Ana  M. Moix

«Les terres promeses is a round novel, in the sense of its thematic and formal synthesis, its latent ambition, its precise and lyric style, but mostly in the magnetic presence of the human and intellectual personality of Joan Barril.» Sam Abrams, El Mundo

«Les terres promeses reveals very high moral and narrative demands. It is, without a doubt, a work of maturity from Joan Barril.» Lluís Muntada, El País

(The Promised Land) Robert Miranda is a Barcelona native who makes his living laundering money. When preparing to make his final delivery and retire, a hurricane disrupts air traffic and Robert is caught, along with other passengers, at the airport in Cayo Tendido, a small island in the Cuban archipelago.During the long hours of waiting, Lucia, an old woman of Cuban descent, explains the events that occurred on that same island over the last week of 1958, when Fidel Castro was about to enter Havana.

At that time arrived a mysterious young man, armed and in uniform. It was the younger brother of the Castros, a prominent Wall Street economist and professor at Harvard, which had received an important commission from the revolutionaries. In the quiet of that island, Santiago Castro began to become aware of other causes and other dreams, and had to face a profound dilemma.

Les terres promeses is a claim of the right to change, to evolve. A moral and humane novel that reminds us that the real promised land can only be find in that intimate territory close to the values and personal history in each of us.