The 38th Herralde Novel Prize has been awarded to Luisgé Martín (Madrid, 1962) for Cien noches and the story of Irene, a woman who travels from Madrid to Chicago to study at university and begins an investigation into the sexual behaviors of rats and humans, experimenting with them herself. Through Irene, the writer wanted to explore the different forms that love and sex take, delving into the limits of loyalty, unconfessable desires, taboos, and the lies that cement our relationships.
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Cien noches, presented under the pseudonym María Slut, was born from reading newspapers and sexological reports about unfaithful people and the desire to know to what extent the truth of the stories they told about their promiscuity could be known, coinciding with the leaks of personal data of clients of the dating website Ashley Madison. The novel, which will go on sale on November 25, "perfectly" links with the writer's work and his pleasure of "looking through the keyhole," as he explains.
The writer Luisgé Martín defines Cien noches as a noir novel: a "small thriller" with a crime and an investigation to discover the murder of the protagonist's partner. He also considers it "vitalist and optimistic" —unlike his usual style— and erotic light, but not pornographic, with a "moral gaze" and an argument in favor of promiscuity. And it is that the writer proclaims that those people who resist infidelity are like those who do not want to accept that there are books that are better not to finish reading and refuse to leave them unfinished. Promiscuity is not only the theme of the novel but also forms part of its structure, with adultery files written by other authors, friends of Martín, such as Edurne Portela, Lara Moreno, and Sergio del Molino.
The jury, formed by Gonzalo Queipo, Gonzalo Pontón Gijón, Marta Sanz, Juan Pablo Villalobos, and editor Silvia Sesé, has chosen Argentine author Federico Falco (Córdoba, 1977) as a finalist for the 38th Herralde Novel Prize for his work Los llanos. With this novel, Falco wanted to write about an element as "un-narrative and with little conflict" as the time that follows a breakup and the landscape in which he grew up, the Argentine pampas.