"DESDE EL NIDO DE LAS CIGÜEÑAS", ANUN FUERTES

Anun Fuertes (Toral de Fondo, León - 1973) works at the Office for Students in the Department of Education in Complutense University in Madrid. When she was 17 she moved to Madrid to study Law and currently she lives here with her family.

The taste for reading and writing have always been present in her life, but it has been now when she has put in words, in her first novel, "Desde el nido de las cigüeñas" (Ed. Atlantis 2013), those voices, facts or situations that have happened around her or just that she has been told.

The story begins when young Ina, about to become 20, visits her grandfather Miguel, seriously ill in hospital and she remembers how he used to tell her tales when she was a little girl, especially Roque's tale, a kid who was born in the Spanish post-war times, a story that Ina would have liked her grandfather to write and that she will tell us now.

Roque's christening is quite an event for all the family, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, although his father is not with them because he went to the south of Spain looking for a job along with his 8-year-old brother Juan. Life is hard for his mother, Elisa, who, despite all the hardships, manages to raise her children, with their own help. Roque has been working as a shepherd since the age of 6, he hardly ever goes to school but dreams of learning how to read, while he's discovering everything around: the mill, the market in Astoria, a medieval town, or the Church where he is an altar boy.

The difficulty of the situation, especially for little Roque, a kid working as a shepherd and who can barely go to school, is relieved by the values of a time when "the most important thing is to be honest", something repeated by his mother, whose sufferings have not stopped her from being the best singer in the area.

The feelings and humanity shown through the whole book, will not allow a reader to feel indifferent.

The book is based on the stories that Anun heard when she was a girl in Astorga, town in which she lived before moving to Madrid. To these stories she added others made up by herself. The setting where they take place is made up of several towns in León, Burgos, Valladolid and beyond borders, Germany, Morocco and Chile.

The fact that a publishing house has accepted the book and seeing it published, has been one of the most exciting moments in Anun's life and, despite the effort, she will continue writing in the future, one of the things that she likes most.

Anun Fuertes