Niños feroces (Fierce Children)
Novel
Destino, 2011, 395 p.

Lazaro, a young trainee writer, can’t find a story to tell. His teacher gives him the story about Jorge, a young Madrileño like himself, who, 70 years earlier, enlisted in the first expedition of the Blue Division on 13 July 1941. A journey that took him to the battle of Krasny Bor on the Leningrad front, and later in 1945, to defend Berlin in the uniform of the Waffen SS. Accompanied by his readings of Walter Benjamin, Jorge Semprun, Günter Grass and Sebastian Haffner, Lazaro writes a vibrant story while the indignados of Madrid’s 15-M movement are camped out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.

Niños feroces is a novel about youths who take up arms in wars while those who unleash them remain safe, well away from the battlefields.

Rights sold : Italian (Guanda)

La estrategia del agua (The water strategy)
Detective novel
Destino, 2010, 350 p.

This new and exciting detective novel by Lorenzo Silva features the now famous criminal investigator Ruben Bevilacqua - more incisive and more ingenious than ever, his assistant Virgina Chamorro and a new character, their pupil Arnau. The three are confronted with a case involving marriage fallouts ending up in a fierce battle for child custody, one in which the reader is drawn into the world of drugs and drug trafficking and the dodgy dealings of senior members of the legal profession. When a dead body is found at an elevator door, police report a case of murder at the hands of professional assassins. A meticulous investigation is set in motion in which the main suspect is the victim’s ex-wife, an unscrupulous woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants.

In this novel, Lorenzo Silva draws on a real-life story that took place in Madrid. He could well have entitled the novel “The women who hate men”, but the title he chooses, The water strategy, is perfect as a metaphor of the victim’s deepest motivation:  “water has no constant form and therefore conquers”.

Rights sold:  Danish (EC Edition) and Italian (Guanda)

El blog del inquisidor (The Inquisitor's Blog)
Novel
Destino, 2008, 180 p.

A historian stumbles on a blog called " The Inquisitor's Blog". Her doctoral thesis focused on the Holy Office in seventeenth century Spain, so the word "inquisitor" immediately catches her interest. The digital diary of this particular inquisitor reveals a tormented man who describes the controversial events that took place in a convent in seventeenth-century Spain. It is not long before the historian finds herself caught up in the inquistor's story and with the blog an its author.

A highly contemporary novel about virtual relations and narration as a form of communication and a form of atonement.

La reina sin espejo (The queen without a looking glass)
Detective novel
Destino, 2005, 384 p.
 
A woman is found stabbed to death in a small town in the province of Zaragoza. Criminal investigator Ruben Bevilacqua and his assistant, Virginia Chamorro, are called to the scene, only to discover that the victim is none other than Neus Barutell, a famous journalist married to an acclaimed Catalan writer. Media hounds are soon sniffing around for sensationalist scoops, putting additional pressure on the two detectives. It is in these strange and disconcerting circumstances that they go to work, stealthily delving beneath the surface of the victim’s public life to discover the weaknesses and insecurities she had managed to conceal under her polished and confident exterior. Bevilacqua and Chamorro will also have to analyse her last journalistic writings. The trail leads them to Barcelona and the initial clues point to a crime of passion in a world of vanity and conceit, evasion and secrecy, one that reaches down into the sordid underworld of the city.
The queen without a looking glass immerses the reader in a complex and spellbinding thriller in which the two Guardia Civil sleuths are required to solve perplexing literary enigmas drawn from Alice through the looking glass, while unraveling cybernetic relationships and collaborating with the local police to resolve this thorny and difficult case.

Rights sold: Danish (EC Edition).

Carta blanca  (Carte blanche)
Novel
Espasa, 2004, 346 p.
Primavera novel prize, 2004

In this impressive and often harsh novel, the author tells the story of Juan Faura, beset by guilt over acts committed when he was a young legionnaire in Morocco and who finally makes the supreme sacrifice to atone for his errors and failures. The story begins in Morocco in the early 1920s with the Spanish army under Franco trying to suppress the Berber revolt. After an interlude in which Juan is reunited with the woman he has always loved, the story moves on to the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in 1936, when Franco was invading the country with his African army to overthrow the Republican government. The novel lays bare the absolute horror of war, which is revealed through the life of a man ruined by an impossible love.

La niebla y la doncella (Fog and the maiden)
Detective novel
Destino, 2002, 300 p.
       
The two detectives are sent to the Canary Islands to get to the bottom of the murder of a young man two years earlier on Gomera island, for which a senior local government official was accused and acquitted. Working closely with local Civil Guards, they are soon faced with a second murder that has a profound effect on all of them. The personal relationships that become entwined with the murders add to the complexity of the story. We learn more about the two detectives and their maturing relationship.

Del Rif al Yebala
Travel book
Destino, 2001, 333 pp.

Travel book on Morocco

El nombre de los nuestros (The name of our fellows)
Novel
Destino, 2001, 288 pp.

This novel is a war story inspired by true-life experiences of Spanish soldiers defending their positions at the battlefronts of Sidi Dris, Talilit and Afrau in Morocco in June–July 1921.

Rights sold : French (Fayard)

Film rights optioned

El alquimista impaciente (The impatient alchemist)
Detective novel
Destino, 2000, 280 pp.
Winner of the Nadal prize, 2000.

A naked dead body, with no signs of violence, is found tied up to the bed of a highway motel. Bevilacqua and Chamorro will get to know the victim's most shameful and dark side, his surprising secret life, as well as the people that surround him at home and at the nuclear power plant where he worked. But as in alchemy, the key lies in patience... "Silva places before us the sterile lives of the nouveaux riches in the fashionable foothills north of Madrid, provincial politicians on the take, arrogant, tax-cheating land developers (...) In truth, it is difficult to know where the detective work stops and social criticism begins". World Literature Today

Rights sold:  Danish (EC Edition).
Film adaptation : Tornasol Films & Continental, 2002 (director : Patricia Ferreira).

La sustancia interior
Novel
1996, Destino, 1999, 2006, 420 pp.

In an undetermined country at an undetermined time, a stranger arrives at a cathedral to work on carving the choir stalls. There, surrounded by scaffolding, craftsmen and supervisors, he discovers a complex organization led by obscure characters who convert the complex task of erecting a temple into an instrument for other purposes. The end takes the reader by surprise. Allegorical and Kafkaesque novel.

El ángel oculto
Novel
Destino, 1999, 327 pp.

A novel in the same vein than La flaqueza del bolchevique, focusing on the lives of discontented yuppies.

El urinario
Novel
Pre-Textos, 1999, 121 pp.

A novel in the same vein than La flaqueza del bolchevique, focusing on the lives of discontented yuppies.

El lejano país de los estanques (The far country of pools)
Detective novel
Destino, 1998, 243 pp.
Winner of the Ojo Crítico prize, 1998

In a torrid month of August, the experienced inspector Bevilacqua is ordered to investigate the death of a young Austrian lesbian in Majorca. He and his assistant, novice agent Chamorro, go undercover in seedy night clubs and nudist beaches.

Film rights sold : Continental Producciones/Tornasol

La flaqueza del bolchevique (The weakness of the Bolshevik)
Novel
Destino, 1997, 196 pp.
Nadal prize finalist, 1997

Monday morning, 8 o’clock. A young executive crashes into a convertible belonging to Sonsoles. He was clearly distracted, but she should not have slammed on the brakes like that or spat out every insult in the book at him. He decides to devote himself to watching Sonsoles and observing her destruction, which is how he gets to know her beautiful 15-year old sister. But the powerful attraction he feels for Rosana brings tragedy in its wake.

Rights sold: French (Lattès), Russian (Symposium & Novy Mir) and Czech (Garamond).

Film adaptation : Rioja Films, 2003