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Natura quasi morta
Natura quasi morta is an astute and brilliant novel of intrigue, which grips us from the first page. With immediate and contemporary characters, sophisticated crimes and everyday settingswhich the author knows at first hand, Carme Rieara successfully maintains the suspense with just the right dose of irony and reality.
The panel considered that Natura Quasi Morta, a rare crime fiction novel coming from one of Spain’s most distinguished authors, would be a valuable addition to the genre in the UK
“Natura quasi morta (Quasi Still Life) is in fact a mix of detective and campus fiction set in a very contemporary European university context familiar to the author, with a significant amount of social criticism thrown in, especially of university staff and students. Loosely based on the true case of a French Erasmus student who disappeared from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where Riera herself is professor of Spanish Literature, the style of the book owes a debt to other detective-story writers from Spain such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Andreu Martín, and international writers such as Donna Leon and the Scandinavians [...] “
“The style of the book is fast-moving and easy to read [...] and the dialogue is fluent and very believable. Although set in a Catalan university, the setting should be culturally accessible to most English-speaking readers, who may just need a brief reminder about a couple of things such as the Bologna Process.” (From the reader report by Judith Willies)