Eight Days without Eva Cortes

It is Antía Ubeira's first day back at the newspaper after the holidays. After years of trying to get pregnant, her period has just come. And she has been given an assignment about a young woman from the Vilar district who has gone missing, when Marcos is the one who normally deals with accident and crime. She is in a stale relationship with her boyfriend, Darío, who writes articles on politics and the relationship between average income and electoral results. Fascinating stuff, but Antía can't bring herself to enthuse about it. When she calls to speak to the missing woman's mother, she hopes the woman will have reappeared and disaster been averted. But no, Eva Cortes is still missing. Over a period of eight days, from Monday to the following Monday, Antía will be drawn ever deeper into the case and find herself getting emotionally involved. On each day, we are presented with a snippet of the missing woman's diary - "Secrets have an expiry date. They don't exist, because sooner or later they end up being revealed" - we follow the progress of the police investigation and read the next day's article. Eva Cortes has a secret that is growing inside her, getting bigger, taking over her life. What can have caused her disappearance? And where is the line between objective reporting and selling newspapers on the back of someone else's misfortune? In this fast-paced narrative that seeks to shed light on Eva's last movements before her disappearance, Antía's role as a reporter will be instrumental in helping to solve the mystery.

Sara Vila Alonso graduated in journalism at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She worked as a journalist on the Diario de Pontevedra. Eight Days without Eva Cortes is her first novel and won the Illa Nova Award for Fiction for authors under the age of 35. Her next novel, The Fire, won the prestigious Blanco Amor Award.