This Saturday night the winner of the Planeta Prize for this 2022 will be announced, the best-awarded literary award, even above the Nobel Prize for Literature, endowed with one million euros. From La Vanguardia we collect the winners of the last ten years.
Lorenzo Silva presents a police novel, the genre that gives him his literary reputation. The story, set in the Barcelona of 2012, goes beyond the facts and promotes a portrait of the human being who is consumed by his contradictions. The story presents a society radically corrupted by dirty money and the exploitation of people. However, in such a dystopian context, love still has a place. After the murder of a retired civil guard, his disciple and old friend, the Bevilacqua brigade, will begin an investigation in which he will discover much more than he expected: police corruption, unscrupulous criminals and a man who will search for impossible love and in duty, rebuild a broken life.
A story full of mystery and unlikely events tells us about the life of Patricia, a young catwalk model whose life is marked by success and comfort. On a work flight, she meets a girl, Viviana, who warns her to be careful of her because someone close to her wishes her death. Patricia, who never gets carried away by baseless superstitions, returns to her house with the intention of continuing with the normal course of her life. However, a series of fortuitous accidents, which affect her work and her private life, lead her to look for Viviana to find an explanation for these events.
Milena, a young woman of unparalleled beauty, lives an adolescence marked by sexual slavery at the hands of a communication tycoon. One day, her protector dies of a heart attack while having sex and the young woman tries to run away from her. This novel recounts the escape of the young woman, in which she will coincide with a trio of vigilantes who will try to help her. However, Milena keeps a mystery with the mark of her own personal revenge. In this story, love and action guide the reader through a denunciation of the abuse of power and the corruption of women's beauty.
This novel is a story where sex, friendship, innocence and evil are mixed in a recipe faithful to the turbulent times where people change to unsuspected levels. Naked Men focuses on the Spanish society of 2015, where the crisis leaves young promises unemployed and women are forced to choose between family or work. In a situation where discontent and injustice are routine, the consequences to which the protagonists are led are completely unpredictable.
Manuel finds himself immersed in the loose ends uncovered by the death of her husband, the son of a powerful family. The widower is immediately rejected by her in-laws, but a retired civil guard encourages him not to run away, since she suspects that the death of her husband is not the first death in the family that has been masked as accidental. . Thus, the protagonist of this story begins the search for certainties in a place of strong customs and convictions, where logic does not always resolve all questions.
Sierra stars David Salas, a Trinity College linguist who meets Victoria Goodman, an old friend of his grandparents, and her young assistant, a mysterious art historian. That fact will disrupt his plans and push him into a surprising race to find out what has happened to one of the students at the school of literature run by Lady Goodman. To his surprise, the key seems to be hidden in the myth of the Grail and its connection with Spain.
Posteguillo reflects on gender conflicts in spheres of power and does so through five characters. 192 AD Several men fight for an empire, but Julia thinks of something bigger: a dynasty. Rome is under the control of Commodus, a mad emperor. The Senate conspires to end the tyrant and the most powerful military governors could stage a coup. Albino is Britania, Severo in the Danube or Nigro in Syria. Commodus retains his wife to prevent his rebellion and Julia, Severo's wife, thus becomes a hostage.
Cercas tells in its pages a crime that shakes the peaceful region of Terra Alta. The owners of his largest company, Gráficas Adell, appear murdered after being subjected to atrocious torture. He is in charge of the Melchor Marín case. Starting from that event, and through a fast-paced narrative full of memorable characters, this novel becomes a lucid reflection on the value of the law, the possibility of justice and the legitimacy of revenge.
The author of the successful Trilogy of the White City won the prize with this historical thriller that spans a century full of revenge, incest and battles. The Duke of Aquitaine is found dead in Compostela. His body is left blue and marked with the 'blood eagle', an ancient Norman torture. Her daughter Eleanor decides to take revenge and for this she marries the son of whom she believes to be her murderer: Luy VI el Gordo, king of France. But the king himself dies during the wedding under identical circumstances. Eleanor and Luy VII will try to find out, together with the Aquitanian cats -the dukes' epic spies-, who wants the inexperienced kings on the throne.
And we end with the last of the winners, Carmen Mola. A delivery not without controversy after it was revealed that three writers were actually hiding behind this name who, to date, had published with the opposite publishing group, Penguin Random House.
The year is 1834 and Madrid, a small city trying to break through the walls that surround it, suffers a terrible cholera epidemic. But the plague is not the only thing that terrifies its inhabitants: in the suburbs dismembered corpses of girls appear that nobody claims. All rumors point to the Beast, a being whom no one has seen but whom everyone fears.
