VINTAGE ESPAÑOL TO PUBLISH THE ACCLAIMED INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING “LA TRILOGÍA DE LA CIUDAD BLANCA” (“THE TRILOGY OF THE WHITE CITY”) BY EVA GARCÍA SÁENZ DE URTURI

Spanish-language editions of El silencio de la ciudad blancaLos ritos del agua, and Los señores del tiempo will be published in 2019 with English translations forthcoming in 2020. 

Already major bestsellers in Spain and Latin America, the sensational Trilogy of the White City will finally be published in the United States in Spanish-language paperbacks and eBooks by Vintage Español. Eva García Sáenz de Urturi burst onto the scene of crime fiction with the publication of El silencio de la ciudad blanca (The Silence of the White City). The acclaimed novel quickly became a bestseller mostly through readers’ word-of-mouth. It was soon followed by Los ritos del agua (The Rituals of Water), and recently Los señores del tiempo (The Lords of Time). To date, the trilogy has sold more than one million copies in Spanish-language editions. El silencio de la ciudad blanca will be released in the U.S. in April 2019.

The other books in the series will follow in June and September 2019. “At Vintage Español we are very excited to bring to our readers The Trilogy of the White City, a phenomenal international success that is easily explained when you meet the characters and discover the city of Vitoria, and follow the steps of Inspector Unai Pérez de Ayala, also known as “Kraken.” It comes as no surprise that a legion of readers call themselves “Krakonians,” and that the city of Vitoria, in the Basque country, has become a tourist destination,” said Cristóbal Pera, Publishing Director, Vintage Español. For fans of crime fiction like Nordic noir, The Trilogy of the White City represents the first example of what we could call Basque noir.   The protagonist, Unai Pérez de Ayala, is a tortured and introspective detective investigating ritualistic and violent crimes linked to the history of the Basque province of Alava, and the action is set against the backdrop of the beautiful streets of Vitoria and the peculiarities of the Basque culinary scene, customs, and surrounding villages. The novels combine these elements with densely plotted mysteries featuring numerous twists and turns and a succinct prose that accentuates the novels’ darkness. Lauded by critics and readers alike, foreign rights to the series have been sold in Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Czech, Greek, Dutch and Bulgarian, with movie rights optioned by Atresmedia Cine and Rodar y Rodar under the direction of Daniel Calparsolo. English translations of The Trilogy of the White City will be published by the Knopf Doubleday Group in 2020. World English and U.S. Spanish rights were acquired in a preempt by the Knopf Doubleday Group and Vintage Español respectively from the Colchie Agency in New York, acting on behalf of the Antonia Kerrigan Agency in Barcelona.  * The Silence of the White City: Young Inspector Unai López de Ayala, “Kraken,” struggles with the memory of a personal tragedy while he investigates a new series of ritualistic murders similar to the ones that rattled the citizens of Vitoria twenty years earlier. The problem is that the person convicted for those murders, a prestigious archeologist, is in jail. This fast-paced, unrelenting thriller weaves in and out of mythology and legends of the Basque country  and is the first introduction to Inspector Unai López de Ayala. The Rituals of Water: Kraken’s first girlfriend, Ana Belén Liaño, has been murdered in a ritualistic manner that has not been seen in the last 2,600 years. She has been burned, hung, and then placed in a Bronze Age cauldron. However, she is not the only one. Other women—always pregnant—are dying at the hands of a psychopath who imitates the “rituals of water” in sacred places of the Basque country and Cantabria. There is no time to waste, because Deputy Superintendent Díaz de Salvatierra is also waiting for a child. In addition, the father could very well be Kraken himself. The Lords of Time: In the final installment of the trilogy, when a businessman is murdered with a medieval poison Inspector Unai López de Ayala will investigate that murder, along with the disappearance of two sisters who are found walled up alive, and the murder of another person killed using a method known as “barreling” (a man is locked in a barrel along with a cock, a dog, a cat, and a viper and then is flung into the river). López de Ayala realizes that someone is mimicking the crimes described in the historical novel that everyone is reading: The Lords of Time, set in the twelfth century in the Villa de Vitoria. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eva García Sáenz de Urturi was born in Vitoria and has been living in Alicante since she was fifteen years old. With a diploma in Optics and Optometry, she worked as an executive for an optical company, and currently teaches at the Universidad de Alicante. She is married and has two children. 

ABOUT VINTAGE ESPAÑOL: Vintage Español was founded in 1994 to publish selected works of fiction and nonfiction in Spanish. Since then, it has expanded to become one of the largest Spanish-language publishers in the United States, offering a growing list of titles across a wide variety of genres, including fiction, sports, spirituality, self-help, personal finance and cooking, to name a few. Our authors include Gabriel García Márquez, Roberto Bolaño, Isabel Allende, Dr. Isabel Gomez-Bassols, Jorge Amado, Sandra Cisneros, Dan Brown, Paulo Coelho, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Jorge Ramos, Stephen King, and Sonia Sotomayor. 

Author: Gina Ruiz

Gina Ruiz is a writer and reviewer living in Los Angeles. She writes about bookish events, books and graphic novels. She is especially interested in the following genres: Chicano, poetry, literature, fiction, mystery, comics, graphic novels, sci-fi, children's literature, non-fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction. She does not review religious literature, self-help, political or self-published books.

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