Translation Rights TQE / Violent Land

In the pleasant and autumnal city of Salamanca, a group of people unsatisfied with their lives search for something or someone that will bring them out of their misery, even at the risk of becoming awful human beings: a master and a maid who mutually hate each other, a cowboy who becomes a hit man in the hopes of making a better living, failed marriages that turn to violence as their escape valve, neighborhood associations whose members are trapped by ancestral hatreds, Neo-Nazis who take their rage out on homeless people and street musicians, priests capable of the most vile forms of behavior to hide their weaknesses, rebellious children who run away from home in search of a fleeting liberty… Until, suddenly, like a biblical punishment, an unstoppable downpour transforms the urban landscape, flooding it without mercy and pushing the population to the limit, exacerbating their worst instincts. No one will come out unharmed and nothing will remain the same in the devastated city.

Luciano G. Egido was born in Salamanca in 1928. After a lifetime’s dedication to the University, literary journalism and the cinema, he published his first novel El cuarzo rojo de Salamanca (The Red Quartz of Salamanca) at the age of 63. With this first novel he won the Miguel Delibes Prize in 1993. With his second, El corazón inmóvil (The Immobile Heart), he obtained the Critics’ Award in 1995. The reader will agree that Egido’s beginnings as a novelist are enviable, and that it would be ridiculous to deny that he is one of the contemporary writers clearly destined for immanent and definitive preeminence.