Barcelona, 6 May 2008 . After the recent publication in 2008 of two works, the novel Let Life Rain Over Me and the book of poems Impure Poems, Nuria Amat has started work on a new novel, the plot of which revolves around the life of Ramón Mercader, the Catalan Communist who gained historical fame as the person responsible for the murder of Leon Trotsky but who remains, nonetheless, a an unknown figure.

There is a family connection between Nuria Amat and Mercader himself. The author has dipped into archives and spoken with relatives to reconstruct the history of this fascinating individual, and has discovered what he always refused to disclose: his youth and life in Barcelona in the 30s, before he went to Mexico. It was there that he murdered the Trotskyite leader with the infamous icepick, thus transforming himself into one of the most enigmatic characters within that fanatical ideological world.

The Barcelona writer doesn’t sidestep the killing of Trotsky but comments “the death of the leader of the Red Revolution, the enemy of Stalin, isn’t the central theme of the novel, because lots has already been said about that. The focus is rather the nature of his assassin and what might have led him to kill Trotsky.” Mercader never confessed who commissioned him to do this but it is well known that Stalin himself was behind a crime that convulsed contemporary history. When he asked Carrillo in 1977 about the possibility of going to die in his native Cataluña, the latter laid down as a condition that he should say who engaged him to murder Trotsky. Mercader refused saying: “I will never betray my people”. His silence is one of the most significant at a crossroads in history.