★On this occasion, the author explores differenceand normality, two concepts that, perhaps, are notexpressed as the reader might expect.
To find out more, you will have to read the novel...
★"For me a novel is like a gift, if they tell you what'sinside it loses all the fun. That's why I never like totell you what my books are about, that's why Ipractically never put anything on the back of mynovels. The beauty of a story is that you delve inwithout knowing what you will find."

It’s raining on a woman who, out of all the souls crowding around a school entrance, wants to go unnoticed. She’s trying to hide her body with the umbrella she’s holding in one hand; in the other hand, she’s clutching a phone she hopes conceals her face. Attention isn’t something she’s eager to attract. She checks the time: still five minutes to go, she was too early. It’s her first day in the city—and the country—and she doesn’t know the area. She doesn’t want anyone to realize that of all the mothers waiting at the school entrance, she’s the only one without a kid to pick up.

Different opens with a stirring scene. We see a woman standing outside a school, waiting for the bell to ring and classes to let out so she can look for a girl who isn’t her daughter. The woman doesn’t even know the girl, but she has a photo of her, which she has closely studied. Every day, this same woman waits, watching the same scene from a distance: the girl’s mother picks her up, then the two of them go to a car together. There, a man who may or may not be the girl’s father is waiting for them. He tries to pick her up and place her in the back seat, but at just that moment, the girl begins shouting, trying to kick and hit him. All the while, the unknown woman watches from a distance.

The narration rewinds to a month earlier. Now we’re in a hospital where a girl named Luna is receiving treatment for several uncommon conditions, including Tourette syndrome and a brain tumor. Despite all this, Luna is contagiously joyful. When she has only a few days left to live, a psychologist comes to visit; she has been assigned to accompany Luna through the final stages of life. Their first conversations are disconcerting. Luna explains that she owns a hat and, when she wears it, she can see into people’s souls. At first, the psychologist thinks this is just girlish fantasy or the product of the brain tumor, but she soon notices odd occurrences happening around Luna. At night, Luna wanders the hospital in a wheelchair. The girl seems to be able to guess people’s secrets—including the psychologist’s secret, which she has never shared with anyone. Luna revives the memory of a woman with Alzheimer’s disease, has extended conversations with an autistic boy, and forms a deep emotional connection with a man who is incapable of feeling anything. And, most importantly, she is capable of performing magic in one very special hospital room: number 444.

As the end of the Luna’s life approaches, the psychologist continues to dive deeper into her universe; she begins to question reality and wonders if it might be true that her hat contains a different world, one where special connections exist between people. That’s when Luna explains her theory: the day will come when all souls will be connected, and no one will be capable of harming anyone else, because we will all feel the pain equally.

When the girl dies, she gives the psychologist a task: she asks her to distribute a few objects throughout the hospital: a box of matches, a lollipop, a seashell, some headphones and a vial of cologne. What’s the connection between these objects? The woman soon discovers them to be the tools Luna used to perform a magic trick that brought hope to all her friends at the hospital. And, finally, the girl leaves a final gift for the psychologist: the photo of the girl from the beginning of the book.

In the next scene, we see the psychologist several weeks after Luna’s death. She’s the woman waiting for a strange girl outside the school, holding the photo Luna gave her. It’ll be a few days until something extraordinary happens: the therapist sees the girl make a series of gestures that are identical to those of her own son, who has been dead for some time. His death was the secret the psychologist had tried to hide. Could Luna have been right? Could there be a connection between all people that we are incapable of seeing? Is the world inside Luna’s hat real? It’s possible that, in the end, it was all much more than just a magic trick.

Luna was born not knowing
she’d grow old while still a girl.
Luna was special, not for being different,
but for finding a use for her difference.
The short time we were together,
I learned that although
she was the one name Luna,
it was I who was in her orbit.
It began all in a hospital
on a day so nearly like any other.
I was there to explain to her
what it meant to die.
But in the end it was she,
who taught me what it is to live.

Eloy Moreno
SPAIN — 1976. Has published fiction, children’s stories, and YA novels. His work is required reading in hundreds of schools and has been a critical and commercial success. His first self-published novel, "The Green Pen" , has sold more than 200,000 copies all over the world and has won numerous awards.And "The Green Pen" has been translated into English, Italian, Dutch, Serbian and traditional Chinese. After "The Green Pen", his "Invisible" and "Earth" became bestsellers, selling more than half a million copies. His latest trilogy of stories for children and "Stories that Make Us Understand the World" has been included in hundreds of education centers as required reading for children. His other works, "The Gift" and "Invisible" , won acclaim from readers and critics alike. With more than 1,000,000 copies of his books soldworldwide, he is one of the most widely read and loved writers, dueto his ability to address universal themes with sensitivity anduniqueness. Eloy's novels vindicate and fight for important valuesin our society, always through a plot full of enigmas and surprises.