You, alone, against the world. Against the Disgusting Ones.
Manuel is an intelligent, restless, and independent young man. He wants to be a functioning member of society, but he’s incapable. He feels mistreated by everyone around him, and mistreated by Madrid, the only place he knows. It’s here that he tries to build a new and better life.
Everything changes one day when, outside his apartment, a riot police mistakes him for a demonstrator and attacks him. Manuel has no choice but to defend himself and, consequently, this changes the course of his life. In the fight, Manuel stabs the cop with a screwdriver he had in his pocket and, believing he has killed him, he flees the scene and, following his uncles advice, he escapes to a small village of rural Spain where no one can find him.
From that moment on, his uncle becomes the only person he can trust. The rest of the world automatically become “the Disgusting Ones” to him. And Manuel, in his new secluded life, walks a path of loneliness and isolation.
His new-found calmness disappears when the house next-door is rented out by some new neighbors that Manuel must hide from, because he is living in an abandoned house he doesn’t own. He’s so annoyed by these neighbors that he decides to make their life a nightmare: he breaks their boiler until it explodes, he puts glue on the switches, he leaves food everywhere so that their house floods with insects… Until they end up leaving and he is (finally) left alone.
Manuel finds happiness in his newfound life, away from the city and its busy streets, and the people who ‘don’t understand him’. Finally, he finds out that the policeman he attacked didn’t die after all and was cured after just a few weeks in hospital.
RELEVANT INFORMATION: The Disgusting Ones (Los asquerosos) is Santiago Lorenzo’s best-known and most acclaimed novel, with hundreds of thousands of copies sold and thousands of reviews in the most popular literary platforms.
The book received the Booksellers Recommend Award (Premio Libreros Recomiendan) for Best Fiction, awarded by CEGAL, and in 2020 had its theatrical adaptation written by Jordi Galcerán and Jaume Bouixó.
The Disgusting Ones is an ode to freedom, a revindication of rural life in opposition to city life. The protagonist is a complex character that invites you to think about the different decisions a city man makes to fit in and feel welcomed in society.
What the critics have said:
“Santiago Lorenzo is one of the biggest literary phenomena in recent times.” Carloz Zasón
“Lorenzo’s books have life; they’re touched by humor. In The Disgusting Ones you crack up watching Manuel’s indignation to the terrifying manners […] of a wrongly named civilization”. El Español
“Robison Crusoe in empty Spain”. El quinto libro (literary blog)
“The Disgusting Ones by Santiago Lorenzo invites you to think about a man that’s fighting for his individual freedom to the point that he prefers isolation to losing his freedom”. Comunicación y Hombre
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Movie.
LANGUAGES AVAILABLE: Spanish.
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