Spanish Beauty

If in her novels of the Instant Trilogy of Madrid (How to stop writing, Sánchez and Gordo de feria) Esther García Llovet built a nocturnal, marginal and almost surreal city, in this Spanish Beauty, the first installment of the Trilogy of the countries of the This one offers us a Benidorm full of English mobsters, Russian millionaires, crappy basement pool halls and half-built skyscrapers: a city ruled by Michela, the corrupt police who needs at all costs to recover a lighter that belonged to the legendary Kray Twins. of sixties London. Cheap people and nouveaux riches, sunburns and cigarette burns, boat kidnappings, late-night parties and illegal operations in second-class hotels, and the sea always in the background as a future urban project in a story about redemption and the search for love in the most maddeningly international city in the entire Mediterranean: a very black novel, drenched in DYC and Beefeater.