Based on the true story of the man who confesses to have stolen the Mona Lisa
Paris, 1911, Belle Époque. The Mona Lisa, perhaps the most celebrated painting in the world, has disappeared from the Louvre. Who is responsible? The police turn Paris and the entire country of France upside-down looking for the thief, but only the reader of this novel will really get under the skin of this man.
The Marquis of Valfierno, the main culprit behind this unforgettable robbery, is a man with a criminal mind that is both warped and brilliant. But the question remains: what is the true nature of the Marquis of Valfierno, the apocryphal Argentinian aristocrat? The protagonist is an unforgettable character who creates and recreates himself with a succession of disguises, infiltrating into a high-society world to which he does not belong and inventing a prestigious though entirely bogus name for himself, in a story that reaches its peak when he plans and executes his most daring exploit of all.
Caparrós does an extraordinary job of crafting the tale of his marginal existence, his desperate, almost blind, search for an identity, and his brilliant evolution as a con-man and spurious marquis. But this superlative novel, based on a real-life story that defies all verisimilitude, is also a reflection on identity and on the values of deception and truth.
RELEVANT FACTS: This exceptional novel, which won the Planeta Award from among 250 competing works of fiction, tells an incredible story based on a real-life adventure tale, but also constructs the landscape of an entire era, the Belle Époque, and paints the portrait of an extraordinary man from his childhood in Argentina to his adulthood in Europe.
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: In development and production for a TV Series format.
AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish, German, English, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Greek, Romanian, Croatian, Turkish, Italian, French
