El penúltimo sueño

‘Following Isabel Allende, Ángela Becerra's El penúltimo sueño explains reality from feelings; and, as Paulo Coelho, it looks forward to transforming reality through feelings.’

La Vanguardia

This novel has been awarded the Azorín 2005 Prize in Spain, and the Latin Literary Award 2006 in the USA. It begins when two people who don't know each other are asked to identify the dead corpses of their old parents, who have committed suicide in an old apartment in Barcelona, wearing old wedding dresses. Departing from this unconventional overture, the novel splits in two different plots that feed each other and help us to reconstruct the lives of the dead characters that we find at the beginning of the text. It seems that their love story began back in 1939 in Cannes, where she (daughter of a wealthy Colombian man) meets a Spanish young man who has had to immigrate to France and works as a waiter to earn a living.

Joan Dolgut and Soledad Urdaneta (the names of the dead couple) lived their first love story in a context where everything went against them: social class, above all, but also the ocean. Since those days in Cannes their lives became an everlasting unfinished dream...

As their story is unveiled, we also witness how a very special relationship begins between their respective son and daughter.