A thousand eyes hide in the night. The city without light.

Singular, controversial, and brilliant, Juan Manuel de Prada's most ambitious novel. We've been waiting a long time for a work like this

Juan Manuel de Prada combines his narrative talent with in-depth knowledge of the intellectual, artistic, and literary landscape of Spain in the first half of the 20th century. The result is a memorable literary project of extraordinary quality in the grand Spanish baroque and grotesque tradition: Quevedo, Valle-Inclán, or Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

The author focuses on the community of Spanish artists who, after the Civil War, found themselves in German-occupied Paris, where living conditions were especially challenging and where they had to use every resource available to survive, even if it meant facing very difficult moral dilemmas.

The protagonist, Fernando Navales, a character previously seen in The Masks of the Hero, is a resourceful writer with as much talent for manipulation as he lacks scruples—a perfect antihero, driven by resentment, the darkest, most persistent, and treacherous of human weaknesses.

The fearsome Commissioner Urraca, a police attaché at the Spanish embassy in Paris, entrusts Navales with a disturbing mission that suits him perfectly: to ensure that Spanish artists in occupied Paris align themselves with Falangist ideologies. The novel features well-known figures like Picasso, César González Ruano, or Gregorio Marañón, alongside other intriguing secondary characters such as Serrano Suñer, Ana de Pombo, or María Casares. Together, they form an ensemble whose journey oscillates between tragedy, a vivid portrayal of the deepest depths of depravity, and the purest picaresque novel