Wonderful World

A bravura performance by a groundbreaking new writer — a novel set in contemporary Barcelona and made up of multiple storylines, including a fictional manuscript by Stephen King. Wonderful World is the story of a son trying to make his father proud — by becoming an international criminal. Lucas Giraut inherits the family company from a father who never really cared enough to get to know him. This inheritance comes with a lot of unanswered questions and one archenemy: Lucas's mother, Fanny, an ambitious and ruthless entrepreneur who believes Lucas is as useless as his father, Lorenzo, an enigmatic man whose recent death — under mysterious circumstances — delights her. Valentina Parini is a precocious and troubled seventh-grader, and the self-proclaimed Top European Expert on the Work of Stephen King. Lucas Giraut is her upstairs neighbor and her only friend. He indulges Valentina as she reveals her dark fantasies of retribution on her classmates and teachers. As Valentina struggles with growing up, Lucas endeavors to understand what he's been bequeathed by his father. Following clues found in a windowless secret apartment and in his dreams, he ends up deep in Barcelona's underworld, far from the comforts of his home, a former ducal palace in the Gothic Quarter. In Wonderful World, Javier Calvo brings together a huge cast of unforgettable characters in a haunting, masterful tale filled with scandalous behavior and dangerous crimes. A dazzling novel in which reality and fantasy entwine, it hails the arrival of a powerful and original voice.