El jardín colgante
» Winner of the 2012 Biblioteca Breve Prize
A boundary-pushing crime novel set during Spain’s democratic Transition. A gripping, addictive read. El jardín colgante, winner of the 2012 Biblioteca Breve Prize, is a bold and provocative novel that cements Javier Calvo’s place as one of Spain’s most distinctive and inventive storytellers. Across a strikingly diverse body of work, he has developed a style that is unmistakably his own.
Once upon a time, there was a country called Spain—fast asleep and unaware that the secret services were quietly working to reshape its institutions for a new era of freedom. That’s when Arístides Lao enters the picture: a brilliant agent with a prodigious mathematical mind and serious trouble with social skills. Lao is tasked with dismantling the far-left terrorist organization known as TOD. He’s aided by Melitón Muria, a loyal sidekick with an unusual moral compass.
Their bizarre and decaying duo sets out to make contact with Teo Barbosa, an undercover agent on the verge of infiltrating the group’s core. But everything changes when Lao launches a plan so outrageous it just might work—and the consequences are beyond anything anyone could have imagined. It’s 1977, and in the cold winter of Spain’s Transition, the evening news is captivated not by politics, but by the mysterious fall of a meteorite.
PRESS
«The Spain of the Transition, seen through a phantasmagoric geometry. Unionists and secret agents cross paths in a game of duplicity and shifting identities. The surreal nature of reality becomes allegory, and storytelling turns into a dazzling mosaic of selves. Masterful pacing, sharply drawn characters, and a brilliant parodic tone come together in a truly remarkable novel.» Jury of the Biblioteca Breve Prize
