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When his mother vanishes, a thirteen-year-old reads her secret memoir — and follows her ghost to Spain.
13-year-old Leo's mother disappears and not even his father can tell him where she is or why she’s left.
As the days pass, his unease grows. When he finds a mysterious file on the family shared drive, his curiosity gets the better of him, especially when he discovers it’s his mother’s secret memoir. Needing to understand the reasons behind her absence, Leo begins to read the book, searching for clues.
Meanwhile, life is increasingly complicated. Adam, an intriguing boy, transfers to school at the end of the year and is assigned as his study partner. Old stresses in his friend group begin to tear apart his long-standing relationships while he wonders if Adam shares his feelings.
As he reads the secret memoir, he is confronted with new revelations about his mother's past, propelling him to look for the lost side of his family that still lives in Spain, setting off a chain reaction of unintended consequences. Old grudges and danger resurface while Leo searches for meaning in his lost families history.
“For a novel born from the gaps in a set of childhood journals, Unwritten is ultimately an argument for looking more closely at those gaps — at the stories omitted from family histories, at the experiences hidden behind appearances, and at the things we leave unsaid because we fear how they might change the way others see us... [It is] an ambitious and deeply personal debut: one that combines the momentum of a family mystery with the emotional intimacy of a coming-of-age story, while asking readers to reconsider what they know about the people they love.” — The Madrid Review
Laura Camacho Frias grew up in a small industrial town in the North of Spain. Despite her initial dream of becoming a translator for the United Nations, life happened; she studied engineering instead and moved to Portugal to complete her first degree. This turned out to be the beginning of a relentlessly high-paced 20+ year professional career, during which she worked in product and project management across several multinational industries, overseeing multi-million-dollar projects and managing brilliant minds.
Because Laura is only human — despite other people's opinions — this way of life contributed significantly to a health scare. That's when she rediscovered her passion for storytelling and became a full-time writer, focusing on stories heavily inspired by her own personal experiences.
Her partner, three kids, and two dogs ensure she still can't have either a proper relaxing day or a full writing day, but deep down, she wouldn't change it for the world. They all live together in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
As Elena, one of the characters in her debut novel Unwritten, puts it: "Suddenly, everything fell into place, and I knew what I had to do. I had to write. That's why I started again.”