"The Circle of Anonymous Heroes" - A Spiritual Thriller Novel by Pedro Correa

The Engineer Poet, the Engineer Poet

A gripping first initiatory novel, in the same vein as Intuitio by Laurent Gounelle and L'Ombre du vent by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.David, a solitary and gifted young man, is searching for meaning and justice. Powerless and lost, he crosses paths in Barcelona with the mysterious Luís Cortés, a distinguished professor at a top business school. Cortés quickly becomes his mentor and invites him to join a secret circle working to change the world by infiltrating major multinationals.Caught in a breathtaking chase through Barcelona, ​​New York, and then Madrid, David must become someone else in order to become himself again and fulfill his destiny. By drawing on his Haitian roots, he reconnects with invisible forces and meets Elsa, a young cleaning lady of grave and innocent beauty, who is trying to escape her past. Transformed by love, David and Elsa will soon form the ultimate spiritual union to overthrow an entire system.

“As a child, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I became a PhD engineer… and this week my first novel is being published by Éditions du Seuil.

My father was a literature professor, and in my bed he would read Candide to me as if it were a children's story (spoiler: it isn't, but it worked really well to put me to sleep).

My parents had experienced hunger during the Spanish Civil War and the post-war dictatorship, so I inherited the values ​​of sacrifice and social mobility with education as the main tool. This is certainly why I combined Polytech, a doctorate in Applied Sciences, and a master's degree in management in evening classes, even though I had spent most of my childhood and adolescence writing and drawing.

When I saw my father die in a domestic accident, everything fell apart. I had become a senior executive in a large multinational, all the career boxes ticked, I was on track.

But this grief shows me that these rails are not mine.

They were built by others. I did not choose where they are headed.

So 15 years ago I took a different path. I became an artist like my mother, and started writing, like my father.

Like the little boy who always wanted to be a writer.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, said that we use half our lives to build our identity... and then we must use the other half to get rid of it.

Why? Because we built this first identity without knowing ourselves, without knowing the rules of the game, by identifying ourselves with the labels that others (our parents, our teachers, our friends, our colleagues, our media, etc.) stick on us.

I wrote a first book that tells of this quest for meaning, this bifurcation, four years ago, Matins Clairs, reissued and translated several times.

Pedro Correa

And then my first novel, "The Circle of Anonymous Heroes," comes out this week, on the already legendary new Verso imprint from Seuil Publishing, with characters who become powerful, who become the heroes of their lives, and in the process take advantage of it to change the world.

My editor, Glenn Tavennec, says this is the first coming-of-age novel in the corporate world (if you know of any others, please add them in the comments 😉).

Some would say that spending 40 years only to end up back where I started is a waste. Personally, I wouldn't change a thing about this trajectory, so rich and unpredictable.

Turning 360° may be a complete circle. But it may also be the path necessary to free ourselves from labels, and bring us back not to the beginning, but to the center, to the fold, to our childhood dreams.