The Truth About the Savolta Case

Eduardo Mendoza's debut instantly transformed the Spanish novel of the seventies. Set in the turbulent Barcelona of 1917–1919, it blends an intrigue thriller with the sardonic humour that would become his hallmark. The pastiche prose — judicial, epistolary, police reports — sounds as fresh today as it did then. It may disorient readers expecting conventional narrative, but that disorientation is precisely the point. A book about how crime disguises itself as respectability, and how a city always has its own version of events.