Los ríos perdidos de Londres
The year is 1880. The place: an abandoned spice warehouse east of the City of London. A crime scene. Two dying, mourning-clad teenagers claim to have killed a high-society lady. A Scotland Yard inspector. No weapons. No answers.
Traveling backward through time, the investigation delves into the Arthur Travers Scientific Society of Belgravia, a guild of Victorian magicians whose teachings are linked to the city’s vanished rivers—and to a strange lady whom no one else can see, appearing on the east wind.
In this story, along with the three others that accompany it, the author constructs a web of texts that functions like maps—or like magical treatises. Victorian-era magician societies, Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes in Rosemary’s Baby, the myth of a death curse, school swimming championships, Mary Poppins, Doctor Who in the Tom Baker era, Queen Victoria, The Cure in the 1980s, the Russian community in Tony Blair’s London, cocaine, opium, heroin, and younger siblings with learning difficulties—all intertwined, swirling in a vortex whose central themes are disappearance and the destruction of reality.
PRESS
«Javier Calvo’s novel belongs to a kind of literature I really love: the good kind.» Ray Loriga
«El dios reflectante confirms Javier Calvo’s extraordinary talent.» Francisco Solano, El País
«A beautiful and intelligent work that delves into the keys of modern culture, giving them unexpected twists.» J.M., El Mundo
«For the first time in years, one glimpses a book with its own personality, one that could become an emblem of the new era: El dios reflectante.» Toni Iturbe, Qué leer
«His forte is breaking clichés, highlighting oddities, which leads to sequences that are eccentric, brutal, or hilarious, but always meaningful… The result is spectacular.» Gabi Martínez, La Vanguardia
