Schavelzon Graham Agencia literaria Barcelona

Belladonna Academy

NOVEL. PLANETA, 2021. 192 PAGES.

An enthralling story in which the criminal arts are playfully given their due with wit and originality.

London, 1932. A small philately shop acts as a front for Belladonna Academy, a school for budding assassins. The young Duncan Dix heads there to learn the skills that will allow him to avenge the death of his parents. A tragic hero obsessed with the past, the temperamental young man is driven by a thirst for justice. After spending his mornings folding shirts at a large department store, at night he joins his fellow apprentices in the classrooms of Belladonna Academy which are strewn across the city in locations well suited to the practice of different forms of murder. Amid poisons, firearms and blowpipes, he learns of the link between crime and philately, the risks of the office, the art of love and seduction and, of course, how to kill. As he makes progress in his fateful quest, a locked door awaits: that of his family's past. With characteristic mastery, Pablo De Santis tells an enthralling story in which the criminal arts are playfully given their due with wit and originality: in Belladonna Academy, an apprenticeship with an unforgettable array of instructors, the unexpected twists of Dix's investigation into his parents' deaths and the passions that rack the main character all come together in the inimitable prose of a great writer.

PUBLISHED BY: Spanish PLANETA