The original version of the title, London falling, is as apt as it is untranslatable because, besides being almost homonymous with one of the most important albums in English music of the 70s of the 20th century – London calling by The Clash – it manages to bring together two of the main axes around which the new and brilliant journalistic investigation by Patrick Radden Keefe revolves: two falls into the void, two decays. The first fall and the most obvious one is that of a nineteen-year-old boy from the balcony of a luxury building into the waters of the Thames, a victim of a web of lies and scams that he himself helped to generate, and the second is that of the city of London, surrendered years ago to the total liberalization of the economy and thus converted into a free landing strip for foreign millionaire oligarchs with plenty of money to launder and no scruples. Mirroring the London of the Industrial Revolution that Charles Dickens novelized, Radden Keefe portrays the London of the 21st century, a glass city that has built mountains of wealth on empty buildings that act as a screen for capital investments of criminal origin, a city where investors dine in five-fork restaurants while looking for the next victim to sell a block of flats in Abu Dhabi.

In February 2024, the writer and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe published an article in The New Yorker –he has been writing for it since 2006– titled A teen's fatal plunge into the London Underworld (La caiguda mortal d’un adolescent als baixos fons de Londres). With his usual style, which blends the rigor of the best journalistic investigation with writing that captivates the reader, Radden Keefe addressed the death, in November 2019, of a 19-year-old boy, Zac Brettler, the second son of a well-off family in West London.

When she was 13 or 14, actress Mireia Aixalà read a book about an IRA terrorist. "I don't remember the title. I was very young and had the idea that terrorists were always bad. With that book, I understood what it meant to be part of a terrorist group. It was a book designed for young people, and it had a big impact on me," the actress recalls. From that moment on, Aixalà has always been drawn to books that explore the Northern Ireland conflict and its repercussions. That's why she can't help but recommend one of the reference titles published in recent years: Don't say anything, from the journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (Periscope), translated into Catalan by Ricard Gil. A combination of journalistic investigation and essay, the book chronicles five decades of the conflict through the eyes of two former members of the IRA (Irish Republican Army), a victim of the paramilitary organization, and one of the key figures in the political mediation effort to achieve peace between supporters of Irish unification and loyalists. Don't say anything It was a huge international success and It was adapted for television, with a series released last year.