The Heart of the Party

An incisive, daring, vibrant, and shameless novel about community and class, the nation and money. 

After inheriting an enormous flat in the center of Barcelona, Clara Montsalvatges decides to transform it into a space where she can take care of friends who are going through a rough patch. But everything changes when a mysterious neighboring couple begins to shout and fight. Partly out of fear and partly as a game, Clara invites her ex-boyfriend to help her “resolve” the situation while they decide what to do with one another. After a night of yelling and fighting, Clara breaks into the flat across the hall and becomes a confidante for her neighbor Violeta Mancebo—the King of Cataluña’s daughter-in-law, who narrates a story in which her modest origins contrast  with those of a wealthy, corrupt social class that holds power. A novel about money and class that melds with the best within the tradition of literature made in Barcelona. 

«Torné can be perfectly placed alongside Philip Roth and Karl Ove Knausgård: he is a master of tone» (Tanya Sweeney, Independent).

«The prodigy of El corazón de la fiesta is that it uses current references that transform into enduring literature before our eyes. Future readers will have the novel, but contemporary ones have the novel as well as the reality that it has trapped or postulated in its complexity, its depth, and its metamorphosis in fiction; it's a reading sensation on steroids» (José Antonio Montano, The Objective).

«Money, aging, death, the construction of nationalism, and an enviable prose with no clichés that is ironic, painful, entertaining. If Torné was from Wisconsin, he'd have written the great American novel» (ABC).

«Gonzalo Torné envisions the tone of parody with critique that has a radical and ferocious essence through the psychological characterization of complex characters with chiaroscuros» (Iñigo Urrutia, El Diario Vasco).