Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Crime & mystery fiction

EL ROL DEL ROC

Màrius Serra

A spate of mysterious disappearances of pensioners is devastating the Horta neighbourhood of Barcelona. Màrius Serra is back with his crime-play series starring Oriol Comas i Coma.

The Horta neighbourhood of Barcelona is hit by a spate of disappearances of pensioners who are leaving retirement homes never to be seen again. Meanwhile the Catalan policethe Mossosarrest a role-playing member of the Devils of Horta group, who has impersonated his grandfather in order to get his pension and is suspected of having something to do with the disappearances. Their detainee is a close friend of the latest admirer of Sol who, with her increasingly complicated love lifeand a couple of satelliteskeeps working for her uncle Oriol. Comas, who is close to retirement age, has decided to bequeath his collection of three thousand table games, three thousand books, and one thousand three hundred game magazines to the Library Service. This keeps him anxious and busy but he can't resist helping Commissioner Carmony to solve the case of the disappearing pensioners. Against a background of social tension amongst young generations who are feeling the effects of lack of opportunities, Màrius Serra combines the intrigue of a crime novel, witty humour, and the world of table games when he brings his crime-play fiction to the neighbourhood of Horta, which emerges as a leading player itself with its combative and bustling social fabric, but also shops with backrooms that are more sinister than they seem. Màrius Serra (Barcelona, 1963) is a regular contributor to the media and holds a trilingual website dedicated to puns and wordplay (verbalia.com). He has published thousands of crossword puzzles and articles, numerous books of narrative and several works of wordplay, including Verbàlia (Empúries, 2000 Octavi Pellissa Prize, Serra d'Or Prize and Lletra d'Or Prize). Among his novels, one should mention Farsa (Columna, 2006 Ramon Llull Novel Prize), the extremely successful Quiet (Empúries, 2008) and the novel Plans de futur (Proa, 2013), awarded the prestigious Sant Jordi Novel Prize, Res no és perfecte a Hawaii (Proa, 2016) and the non-fiction title D'on trec el temps (Empúries, 2017). In 2023 he published La dona més pintada (Proa, 2023), that was shortlisted in the Òmnium Award for Best Novel of the Year. After the publication of the best-seller thriller La novel·la de Sant Jordi, written with Oriol Comas i Coma, (Amsterdam, 2018), he followed up with more investigations, Jugar-s'hi la vida (Amsterdam, 2019) and Fora de joc a Montserrat (Empúries, 2021). The latest published title in the series is El rol del Roc (Empúries, 2024), a playful novel that mixes board games and the clash between generations.

Available products
Book Published 2024-10-09 by Editorial Empuries

Comments

The novel combines intrigue with imagination and Serra's trademark wordplay.

Multi-awarded author with the Sant Jordi Prize, the Serra d'Or and the Lletra d'Or Prize, that are among the main awards in Catalan

Creator of the radio program Enigmàrius ongoing for 18 seasons

Serra's ability to master narrative timing makes for a dizzying read, written with a fresh style and baffling inventiveness.

For Màrius Serra, literature is a game, and each book is approached as an exercise in reinvention. [...] The writer has set out to make his first foray into the noir genre, mixing metaliterary references with a sense of humor that, although is not destructive, sets up a rather devastating panorama of the literary world.

The novel is a satire of the literary world, including publishing houses, bookstores and media that surround the Book Day celebration. It is also a defense of literature as a game, an advocacy for a personal territory where ingenuity, mental agility, imagination and unpredictability defeat everything that is sticky, programmed and expected.