The Man who Sold the World

Simó Diarte is a communication and advertising professional who works at an international agency located right in the heart of Barcelona’s Quadrat d'Or. Despite his experience, one of his latest projects has him deeply unsettled: Rosa Dorca, a mayoral candidate with a distinctly populist style, has used his creative ideas to boost her campaign.

At a complicated point in his life, caught between professional and personal disillusionment, in a Barcelona transformed by canals and bridges reminiscent of Venice, with a distant daughter and a cat that doesn’t like him much, Simó faces the pressure of pleasing those who truly pull the strings of power. All this while he struggles not to lose his own judgment and the ability to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, between sanity and paranoia, between truth and pure advertising deception. As if that weren’t enough, he is convinced he has seen a corpse inside one of the campaign cars…

Culminating the trilogy begun with Sobre la terra impura and Tots els mecanismes, Melcior Comes returns with a densely human novel of torrential force, tinged with sarcastic humor, streaked with thriller elements, and imbued with a powerful symbolic dimension. A novel about uncomfortable truths and endless self-deceptions, about the divide between duty and desire, success and failure, and an era —our own— that compels us to choose and decide without rest or balance.

A populist candidate for Barcelona City Hall. A communication expert between the sword and the wall. A city sold to the highest bidder. The new great novel by Melcior Comes.