Author of 14 novels and three short-story collections, her work has been translated into twenty languages and frequently adapted to film.

[4] Emilie L. Bergmann said, the novel "represented a breakthrough for eroticism in women's writing"[5] having sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide.

[3] In it, she contemplated the life of Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira, a woman in 20th-century Spain who shot her own daughter rather than lose control of her.

[2] Grandes' literary work was influenced by 19th century Spanish writers Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Pérez Galdós, among others.

[4] When she was a child, her grandfather gave her Odyssey by Homer and she considered that, together with Don Quixote, they were the two major influences for her work and particularly for her interest in characters who were survivor archetypes, muddling through their circumstances one way or another, as opposed to heroes and antiheroes.

That attack, in which two people died, marked the end of a ceasefire during which ETA had been in negotiation with the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

[15] Grandes also gave her opinion about Spanish society, which she argued had become dumb and vulgar,[16] and blighted by consumerism, materialism, and indifference to suffering.

[16] In Los besos en el pan (2015), she wrote about the Spanish crisis of 2008 and claimed that humility was the only way to get rid of it.