Mercedes Salisachs defined herself as a woman who needed to write. It is surprising that she published her last novel just a few months ago, at the age of 96 and with a serious degenerative disease diagnosed five years ago. With it she closed a long and fruitful degree program in which we must highlight not only her forty titles and multiple awards (Planeta, Ciudad de Barcelona, Fernando Lara, Alfonso X el Sabio...), but also the numerous editions of her works (La gangrena reached 60) and translations into other languages. Despite the scarce recognition she received from academic critics, knowing that her novels were appreciated and valued by a large issue of readers was for Mercedes Salisachs one of her greatest prides. 

Closeness to readers and the need to write are two sides of the same coin in her work: the concern to reflect on human relationships as they are configured in the closest contexts. Her novels are set in the times and spaces in which she lived, and although she always stressed that there was nothing autobiographical in her works, she also explained that ¿since I was a child I had the need to explain to myself the incongruities, the injustices and the inanities that I perceived in my environment. Salisachs lived in a context of great social changes. Born in 1916, during the First World War, she married in 1935, a year before the civil war began. The experiences lived at that time, both in Barcelona and in exile (her father was a well-known republican), deeply marked her harsh vision of existence. The early death of her second son is also often underlined as a vital crisis that would leave its mark on many of her works (Vendimia interrumpida, El declive y la cuesta). For her it was above all a moment of change of horizons: from then on her religious beliefs found a fullness of meaning.

His restless mind did not fail to recognize the transformations brought about by the events of the late 1960s, or the opening of the transition. And in the face of the increasing acceleration of lifestyles, in his novels, relationships described in his process of self-understanding, acceptance and frustration continued to appear. Dilated in time to consciously put on the table the consequences of the long deadline. Challenged by the pain of illness and death.

For many, these will be novels that seem distant today. They dialogue with situations that are no longer current, they respond to social pressures that fortunately have been overcome, or to approaches in which the contemporary reader does not see himself reflected. But there will also be those who find in these works, as in so many that have transcended their own era, stories that allow the heart to have a place in which to converse with its own experiences.