Rafa del Olmo

Impact of Covid-19 on Tourism in the city of Madrid

• Espérame en Callao', Rafa del Olmo's first novel, captures the atmosphere in Madrid during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Madrid professor Rafa del Olmo has signed ‘Espérame en Callao’ (Estrella del Norte), his first novel, which is set in the Spanish capital during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The chapters travel through Madrid, through its Metro stations. From Callao to Sol via Carabanchel, you will be able to visit the places where the characters live.

The search for the truth, the struggle for authenticity with ourselves; the Covid19 pandemic, ‘which is much talked about in the news but little in fiction’, according to the author; mental health, the LTGB community; the culture of hate speech that is being installed in this society; the daily life of a high school with the city of Madrid in the background and the bullying that many young people suffer, are some of the themes that he reveals through his characters’.

 ‘I have lived all my life in a big city, in Madrid, where people can be freer in many aspects of their lives.  There is a character in the book who comes from Ciudad Real to Madrid, to be happy and live the life he deserves. We all deserve to be able to live with authenticity and to match who we are with what we do’, explained the author of the novel.

‘Rafa del Olmo shows us characters who swarm around Madrid in search of their identity, because without knowing who you are there is no happiness possible. The main character, Juan Polo, is married, with a teenage son, but at the same time in love with another man. This tension will be easy to accept, especially when the Covid is spreading its wings of death all over the world and he is a nurse in a large hospital in Madrid. A homo erotic novel, yes, but about life and the inner struggles of every human being’, says the Cantabrian publisher Estrella del Norte.

‘Wait for me in Callao’ is a thrilling cocktail of secrets, passions and suspense in the months before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Now that it is five years since this brutal episode, in which so many people lost their lives, and which shocked us all, this work is also a tribute to the health workers who suffered so much in that pandemic.

Access the purchase at this link: https://www.amazon.es/ESPERAME-CALLAO-RAFA-DEL-OLMO/dp/8412923286