As a character-driven novel, it’s a magnetic, entertaining work that blends comedy with suspense, offers novel situations and memorable characters, and carries a strong sense of sentimentality. Floating Garden, the third book in the series, is showcased at 11:30 am on a Saturday at the UA City Venue in Alicante by a photographer and writer born in Alicante.
It’s hard to pin down its genre, the author notes, describing a story set in San Sebastián that builds a fiction with psychological depth and a twilight thriller mood where mystery, drama, and sophisticated high comedy converge.
The book’s title pays tribute to a painting by a notable artist, with a character nicknamed “big dude” imagined with certain exceptions and nuances. Yet the plot around this painting does not strictly hinge on it.
Everything begins one night when a man named Víctor encounters a woman from his past. That encounter sends him back in time and opens doors to others, exposing past moments that reshape his present and reveal a darker side of the antihero at the center of the story.
Several women who have played roles in his life appear on the page; one is ahead of her time and remains by his side, bringing a sense of anxiety to the present. A meeting with an old friend, a famed opera singer, and a tense dynamic with his wife create a web of relationships that propels the plot forward.
There is drama and soap-opera scale in this spider’s web, threaded with betrayals, humor, erotic tension, suspense, and a level of complexity that fans will recognize. It follows a vein familiar to the author’s earlier work, Imagine My Soul (2018).
Pepe Calvo returns to the novel with a family saga
Delia and Anfibia seem to have constructed their own identities, the author observes. Ideas arrive with a flow that feels almost inevitable, as if the novel has already been written and the writer is merely guided by the characters. Sometimes the path seems straight; other times, it bends, and the characters push back when the course feels wrong.
Two approaches to novel writing are acknowledged. One involves outlining what will be written, the other a compass-like map guiding the story. The latter reflects the author’s style, where the plot leads to characters who sometimes act decisively and at other times push themselves beyond limits.
Paz Castello and Mario Martinez Gomis
The presentation of Floating Garden is presented by the author, with Paz Castello and Mario Martinez Gomis, a modern history scholar who wrote the foreword, alongside Luis Muñoz, editor of the Letrame Editorial Group. The event also features several performers who read excerpts from the work, including actors and a reader who brings parts of the story to life.
The author looks toward the future with a sense that this story may become the next big project in a long line of novels, a hopeful horizon for what may come after this finished manuscript.