Discussion: "Luis Melgar's 'Night Falls on Shanghai'"

This literary discussion, focused on Night falls on Shanghai (Plaza & Janés, 2026), by writer and diplomat Luis Melgar, offers an approach to Shanghai in the 1930s, a city marked by intrigue, diversity, and major international conflicts. Using the novel as a starting point, both the historical context and the Spanish presence in the city will be explored in a dialogue that combines literature, history, and diplomatic experience, with the participation of Rafael Dezcallar and Alberto Marwaistband.

In the 1930s, Shanghai was probably the most fascinating and dangerous city in the world. Diplomats, businessmen, gangs, journalists, and revolutionaries coexisted in a metropolis fragmented by foreign concessions and riddled with the major conflicts that were about to transform the 20th century.

The story begins at the Spanish Consulate in Shanghai, during a reception on Midsummer's Eve in 1935. Suddenly, two gunshots interrupt the music, and a mysterious Russian aristocrat falls dead before the guests. From that moment on, three young Spaniards—the photographer Isabel de la CruzThe businessman Miguel Roxas, heir to the San Miguel brewery, and the Basque pelota player Asier Ormaetxe—are drawn into an international intrigue that connects the rise of fascism in Europe, the Japanese threat in Asia, and the conflicting interests of the powers in China.

The novel also reconstructs a little-known chapter of the shared history between Spain and China: the presence of a small but active Spanish community in Shanghai between the wars. Diplomats, merchants, and pelota players found in the city a space of opportunity where cultures, interests, and ambitions from all over the world coexisted.

Through a plot of espionage and international conspiracy, Night falls on Shanghai It offers a literary portrait of a unique city: a place where the glamour of grand hotels and nightclubs coexisted with smuggling, opium trafficking, and political intrigue; a Shanghai in which the conflicts that would mark the destiny of the 20th century were already being foreshadowed.

Welcome remarks,
José Pintor, Director General of Casa Asia

Participants:
Luis Melgar, writer and diplomat
Rafael Dezcallar, former Spanish ambassador to China
Alberto Marcos, editor of Plaza & Janés

Luis Melgar (Madrid, 1980) is a Spanish diplomat and writer. Between 2019 and 2026, he was posted to China, first at the Spanish Embassy and later at the European Union Delegation in Beijing. He has published more than twenty books of historical fiction, essays, and autofiction, as well as children's books and popular science books.

Rafael Dezcallar, Spain's ambassador to China since 2018, has a long career as a diplomat, having served as Spain's ambassador to Ethiopia (2003-2004) and to the Federal Republic of Germany (2008-2012), in addition to having been Director General of Foreign Policy between 2004 and 2008.

Alberto MarcosA history graduate, he worked as a television writer and screenwriter, a role he combined with various jobs as an author and proofreader for different publishing houses. He currently works as an editor at Penguin Random House, at the Plaza & Janés imprint, and teaches editing in the Master's programs at the Autonomous University of Madrid and in Cultural Management at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 2013 he published Life in progress in Pages of Foam. Real men It is his second book of short stories.