Life and adventures of a modern rogue torn between drama and laughter.

Gaspar is nineteen years old and alone in the world. After the death of his mother, who raised him alone in a rundown hotel where she worked as a jack-of-all-trades, he tries to make a living the best way he knows: serving others, fixing broken things, and going unnoticed. First as an assistant to Pandora, a wealthy widow who survives by indulging in eccentric parties, and later as a caretaker for a couple whose faces have become unrecognizable after an accident and who hire him with a single strange condition: not to ask a single question.

Like a modern picaresque novel, El efecto deseado follows the life of the orphan Gaspar as he awakens to a world where, to avoid being devoured, he must go from being prey to becoming a hunter. A long journey full of fears and excesses, taking him from a frivolous and decadent capital to a mansion inhabited by ghosts on a lost island in the Mediterranean.

After dazzling with the short story collection La lengua entre los dientes, Guillermo Alonso continues refining a unique style that effortlessly takes the reader from melodrama to laughter in "an emotional carousel as hilarious as it is tender, with echoes of McCullers and Capote, absolutely brilliant" (Rosario Villajos).

"You laugh until you start to cry." Marta del Riego, Zenda

"A perfect cocktail between a contemporary Capote and the corrosive intelligence of Bret Easton Ellis." María Jesús Espinosa de los Monteros

"As hilarious as it is tender. Absolutely brilliant." Rosario Villajos