The reader will not be able to put “Fire in the heart” down. Its main character, Oscar, lives in a rich neighbourhood of Barcelona, surrounded by everything he needs, but in constant conflict with his parents at home and with his teachers at school.. His only consolation is his younger brother and playing tennis until one day he decides to make friends with Antonio, a gypsy boy that cleans car windscreens at a set of traffic lights. Oscar could not have imagined that his and Antonio’s lives would change from that moment onwards,. Oscar discovers the city’s other side: social exclusion, racism, violence, drugs…. but also friendships and disinterested devotion, while Antonio finds in Oscar the opportunity to escape from a closed and sordid world.
The novel, narrated in the first-person by the main character, Oscar, is very realistic and has perfectly captured the mentality and language of the adolescent and adult characters that are involved in the plot. It is a lively and entertaining book, which, in spite of being set in a specific geographical framework, has a universal message: increasingly often in our urban societies, we come across truly parallel worlds, whose inhabitants would say that they live in different countries, when, in fact, they are barely a few kilometres from each other.
