The Monte Carlo Fallacy (La falacia de Montecarlo)

When a successful editor is left in a coma after an absurd accident, his absence triggers a chain of revelations that shakes a powerful Barcelona family. Infidelities, lies, and secrets come to light in this novel based on real events.

On an ordinary morning in June in Barcelona, Sergio García—an influential, ambitious, womanizing editor—is run over by a bus. The accident does not kill him, but leaves him in a coma. This fortuitous, utterly banal event interrupts a life built on control, privilege, and lies, and unleashes a chain reaction that affects three generations of a Catalan bourgeois family.

Sergio is married to Blanca Bonet, the youngest daughter of Anselmo Bonet and Adela Belloch, an emblematic couple of the upper bourgeoisie. Blanca does not work, lives off family wealth, and has devoted her life to maintaining a perfect image as wife, mother, and elegant woman.

While Sergio remains unconscious in the hospital, Blanca is handed the mobile phone her husband lost in the accident by a newsstand vendor. Going through it, she discovers that Sergio has maintained multiple extramarital relationships for years, organized under false names, parallel schedules, and an absolute lack of shame. The revelation destroys the idealized image Blanca had of her marriage.

However, in order to preserve appearances, she decides to hide the scandal from her children, friends, and social circle. Terrified of loneliness and of public opinion, she secretly begins a relationship with Fran, a hospital physiotherapist. Although Blanca interprets this relationship as a liberation and a belated emotional awakening, in reality it reproduces the same pattern of emotional dependence and denial she learned from her own mother.

At the same time, another earthquake strikes the publishing house where Sergio works. Rebeca Molina, his assistant—a young, capable professional who has been systematically undervalued—is forced to assume her boss’s responsibilities during his hospitalization. For the first time, she holds real decision-making power. Rebeca is the one who champions the publication of The Customs House, a novel Sergio had blocked out of disinterest and prejudice.

The novel’s author is a discreet, humble high school teacher with no connections or social ambition. The Customs House tells a story set in the 1980s in the Pyrenees: a smuggling network along the Franco-Spanish border sustained by corrupt authorities, local businessmen, and security forces, where abuses of power, blackmail, and a rape were silenced to protect economic interests.

What the protagonists gradually discover is that the novel is not merely historical fiction. The author is in fact the son of Anselmo Bonet—the patriarch of the Bonet clan—and Dolors Ventura, Anselmo’s great youthful love. Decades earlier, Dolors was forced into silence when she became pregnant after being raped by the son of a high-ranking French official involved in the smuggling ring. The Belloch-Bonet family, tied to those illegal businesses, covered up the crime to avoid scandal and protect their social standing. The author grew up without knowing his true identity, while the family that destroyed his life prospered without consequences.

Anselmo Bonet, now retired, receives a letter from Dolors asking him to help publish her son’s novel. For Anselmo, the book’s publication becomes a belated act of reparation. His wife, Adela Belloch—who has always been obsessed with appearances—was an active accomplice in covering up the rape, the corruption, and the abuses that kept the family name intact. Her priority is not truth or justice, but that nothing appear out of place.

When Sergio awakens from the coma, he discovers he has lost everything: his wife has removed him from family life, his position at the publishing house has been taken over, his lovers have abandoned him, and his only company is Camila, the Argentine newsstand vendor who witnessed the accident and who, moved by compassion, takes him in. Sergio goes from being a powerful man to depending emotionally and financially on a woman he would never have looked at before.

The story culminates when The Customs House wins one of the country’s most important literary prizes. The book’s publication publicly exposes the network of corruption, the covered-up rape, and the pacts of silence that sustained the Bonet-Belloch family for decades. There is no heroic confession or full justice, but there is an irreversible rupture: the truth can no longer be hidden, and the narrative of the exemplary family collapses.

The Monte Carlo Fallacy is a social comedy with a strong dramatic undercurrent that portrays, with irony and bluntness, a privileged class convinced that chance will always favor them. The novel shows how a series of seemingly minor events—a traffic accident, a lost mobile phone, a published novel—dismantle an entire system of privilege, silence, and lies, forcing its characters to confront, for the first time, the consequences of their actions.

RELEVANT INFORMATION: Eva Santana López is a Spanish writer, screenwriter, and lecturer, a finalist for the Edebé Prize for Children’s Literature, and second prize winner at the 2nd Short Story Competition of the Spanish Association of Writers and Artists.

The Monte Carlo Fallacy is a novel that, although conceived as a drama, can also be read as a comedy. Starting from an absurd accident, the story sets in motion a chain of misunderstandings and poor decisions within a wealthy family accustomed to controlling its image. The characters are clear and recognizable—the patriarch, the mother obsessed with appearances, the unfaithful husband—and their attempts to hold the family together only complicate matters further. The tone does not aim for jokes, but irony emerges from watching the order they believed solid crumble while they struggle to prevent it. In the vein of Casa en llamas.

AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Feature Film, TV Film.

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish.