The Falsifiers. Intrigue and plotting to change the world

In this 2007 science-fiction adventure, French-American author Antoine Bello depicts how a secret global organisation can construct fake news in order to twist the course of history in favour of a secret objective. This is the first instalment of a fast-paced action trilogy that takes the reader on all sorts of moral justifications in order to lie to the world and sleep easy at night.

When young Icelandic Sliv Dartunghuver starts his final year internship at an environmental research company, he has no idea that he has come into contact with the Consortium for the Falsification of Reality.

After his initial reluctance, he accepts his first mission in the heart of Africa. Soon, hooked on scripting forgeries of reality and apocryphal documents or testimony to support theories that change the course of government and private corporate policies across the globe, he wants to discover the ultimate motives of the organisation to which he will devote his entire life.

To find out, he must climb to the top by means of internal conspiracies and competition against Lena Thorsten, his Danish rival within the secret organisation. Faced with successes, failures, collateral victims, salvific scenarios, hopes and disappointments, will Sliv discover whether all his manipulations have served any constructive purpose?

This trilogy not only captures the reader through Bello’s agility in weaving and inserting intrigues like matryoshkas one inside the other, or by gradually constructing fascinating characters through the ambiguity of their ethics.

It also has the merit of clearly depicting how the truth that triumphs in public opinion is that which is best supported by people’s common sense, by the unspoken desires of the majority, and by the legitimacy granted by testimonies and material evidence combined from diverse and even improbable sources.

Politics, communication, business strategies, sectarian obsessions, cultural hegemonies, religions… everything is exposed in a book that speaks of credulity to encourage scepticism and, at the same time, mobilisation. 

This novel has been translated into 8 languages. At the age of 52, Antoine Bello has announced his retirement from literature to devote himself to The Population Project initiative. Is this the truth or another attempt to divert and camouflage?

“Who reads ten centuries of history and doesn’t close it when they see the same things with a different date?”

León Felipe

Read books: use the master key that opens every door

For as long as the world has existed and people have inhabited and travelled it, basically the same things have always happened, one generation after another. Since ancient times, books have been telling stories with their unhurried voice. Literature is the sharp and infallible microscope invented by human beings to look at themselves in the mirror of their conscience without being able to look away. The kaleidoscopic truth of literature hypnotises like an abyss and liberates like someone growing wings. Do you want to learn more? Read books. Do you hope to understand current affairs beyond their superficial disguise? Read books. Do you feel like a puppet in the gullible and indistinct daily crowd? Read books.