Xavier Alcalá has spent five decades turning Cold War escape routes, declassified archives, and firsthand testimony into fiction. Built on evidence, not imagination.
An 18th-century thriller based on declassified naval records
Librería Platero. Specialists in rare and out-of-print books. This now closed secondhand bookshop on Calle Talcahuano — Buenos Aires's street of forgotten books — Xavier Alcalá found a facsimile of the original British court-martial proceedings.
A real naval trial. A real ship lost off Cape Horn. A real crew that dismantled the wreck and sailed a makeshift vessel to the Pacific Ocean.
He spent the next years turning those documents into . The investigation came first. The novel followed.
For readers of David Grann's The Wager and Patrick O'Brian.
15.000 miles of travels and conversations across every province in Argentina, police files, forgotten anarchist massacres, Nazis in Patagonia... all revealed by first-hand witnesses in the end of the world.
An inside literary job inside the classified Cuban reality, narrated by mighty women who fought and survived Castro.
50 years of dictatorship shaped the minds of three generations in Spain. Xavier lived to experience it himself and meet witnesses of an era that seemed past.
Xavier Alcalá doesn't research to write. He writes because he investigated. Every novel in this catalog is built on real expeditions, declassified archives, and firsthand testimony. The fiction is the frame. The facts are the foundation.
"If I haven't been there, I don't write about it."
— Xavier Alcalá
The real documents behind the fiction. Court-martial records, field notebooks, missionary diaries. Delivered directly to your inbox.
