El dulce dictador

Synopsis

Born in Corsica, Solomon Falkner flees a family that never wanted him and enlists in the Franco-American army at fourteen, in the thick of the Third World War. Under the wing of General Valcourt—who trains him and abuses him in equal measure—he becomes the most lethal soldier of his generation: tall, blond, turquoise-eyed, capable of killing with his bare hands and surviving the unthinkable. His talent and his looks do not go unnoticed by Lemón Cruz, an arms magnate who takes him under his protection—and under his control—turning him into lover, spy and pawn in his political schemes. When General Valcourt tries to have him killed and Solomon kills him barehanded on the Greenland ice, he believes he has finally won his freedom. He is wrong: Lemón is still pulling the strings, even after Solomon marries Olimpia, the magnate's daughter, in a union that begins as genuine love and ends as a political alliance. A plot orchestrated by Lemón himself drives Solomon and Olimpia into exile in a nameless, devastated stretch of the Near East. There, where the world believes him dead, Solomon decides never to return. On the ruins of ancient Syria, with the help of a handful of refugees and his loyal architect Alfonsa Campbell, he raises Victoria: a capital of white marble, monumental avenues, a metro line decorated like a museum and a lighthouse that draws the dispossessed of the world towards a country where housing, healthcare and education are free. The Solomonic Republic is born, and with it a new title for Solomon: the Sweet Falkner, the Sweet Dictator. But neither power nor beauty can shield him from love, which remains his true vulnerability. He loves Olimpia, who will become his political nemesis; he loves Cómodo, the soldier whose life he saved and who will pay with his own for the price of that passion; he loves, years later, Antonio, his brother-in-law and physician, who will prove the only one capable of accompanying him to the end. Between family betrayals, a forced exile following a popular uprising, the reconquest of his throne and the founding of ever more ambitious cities, Solomon Falkner builds, dismantles and rebuilds a utopian empire that no one else has managed to equal. On the threshold of death, ill and aware that his time is running out, Falkner narrates his own story in the first person: that of a hungry child who became soldier, lover, killer, father of an entire nation and, finally, legend. El dulce dictador is the intimate chronicle of a man who had the power to build paradise on earth, but never quite managed to free himself from the chains of his own wound.

Machine translation, pending review.