Following the disappearance of her best friend, a woman resumes her search for the truth in 1950s San Sebastián. Abandoned mansions and silenced secrets underpin a story with hints of a crime novel. Nagore Suárez, an author with thousands of copies sold, crafts a novel with a hypnotic atmosphere where memory, art, and the supernatural intertwine.
San Sebastián, 1952. Manuela Duarte returns to her hometown after years of absence, fleeing the control of her brother Hernán. There, she reunites with Pedrito Ortiz, a childhood friend now turned businessman, and soon finds herself drawn to the mysterious Villa Allur, recently acquired by the enigmatic French duke Julien Leroy-Benoit. During a party at the mansion, Manuela discovers a painting created by her missing friend Ava Braud, whom she has not seen since 1938, when they were together at a boarding school in Florence. The appearance of the canvas, inspired by Ava’s prophetic dreams, sparks an obsession: to discover what happened to her.
Determined to find the truth, Manuela, with the help of Pedrito and the eccentric bookseller Roger Foss, begins an investigation that leads her to France, where she discovers one of Ava’s notebooks containing a drawing of a red serpent, identical to the duke’s ring. The investigation reveals links to a secret occult society, The Scarlet Serpent, founded by the mysterious Frédéric Bauer and now led by Julien.
Manuela’s inquiry uncovers Ava’s tragic fate: after becoming pregnant, her parents committed her to a convent and later to a sinister sanatorium, where she gave birth to a girl, Louise, who was taken from her. Ava suffered abuse at the hands of the asylum’s director, Dr. Yuste, and the powerful Rodrigo Monterreal, the civil governor of Guipúzcoa, both involved in a network dedicated to the disappearance and sale of babies. Diego Monterreal, Rodrigo’s nephew and Manuela’s former lover, is the one who reveals to her the horrors perpetrated by Dr. Yuste and the governor. Ava was supposedly killed in a fire, but Manuela discovers that her death was staged by Julien and the medium Dafne Vasileiou to help her escape.
The climax comes when Manuela discovers that Ava is alive, hiding in the tunnels beneath Villa Allur, and that Julien helped her return in order to reclaim her daughter, who was adopted by the Ortigosa-Celaya family. In a final confrontation, Rodrigo Monterreal executes Julien and pursues Ava and Manuela to a cliff. In an act of ultimate liberation, Ava throws herself into the sea. Rodrigo is killed by his own nephew, Diego Monterreal, who subsequently accepts his sentence.
One year later, life attempts to move on. Manuela and Roger now run the bookshop together, and she visits Ava’s daughter—now named Aurora—to give her the painting her mother created for her, leaving a final spark of hope regarding Ava’s legacy and the secrets that dwell within dreams.
RELEVANT INFORMATION: Nagore Suárez is one of the emerging voices of Spanish-language thriller fiction. A true critical and commercial success, she has become a benchmark for mystery and suspense storytelling. La música de los huesos, her debut novel, was both a critical and sales success. In 2019, her Twitter thread titled “El ángel de la guarda” garnered more than one and a half million impressions and won the Audience Award sponsored by Ámbito Cultural, as well as the El Corte Inglés Award for Best Thriller and Mystery Thread.
Lo que habita en los sueños is a novel filled with secrets and mysteries, set in a fascinating time and place, with distinctive, unconventional characters. The plot skillfully blends intrigue, suspense, and the human drama of a dark period in Spanish history. Manuela’s investigation not only drives the narrative forward but also becomes an intimate journey in search of truth and the memory of silenced women. It is a novel perfectly suited for a major historical production charged with mystery and suspense.
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Feature Film, TV Movie.
AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish.
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