The 100,000-euro award, sponsored by Espasa and Ámbito Cultural de El Corte Inglés, has gone to a psychological thriller about a substitute teacher, El confidencial (The Confidential). Series-mania has arrived in the book world, and is threatening to stay.

This Thursday, screenwriter Carlos Montero (Celanova, Ourense, 19720), the creator of teenage series such as 'Física o Química' (Physics or Chemistry) and adaptations such as 'El tiempo entre costuras' (The Time in Between) has won the 100,000-euro Primavera Prize with the novel 'El desorden que dejas' (The Mess You Leave Behind), a psychological thriller about a substitute teacher in a rural high school. Editorial Espasa and Ámbito Cultural de El Corte Inglés are the sponsors of the Primavera Prize, which this year has come to its 20th edition. In the town of Novariz –which Montero has confessed is closely modeled after his hometown—a substitute teacher discovers in her first day of work that her predecessor committed suicide. After class, she finds a note in her purse that reads, “And you? When are you going to kill yourself?” The threat feeds her obsession and prompt her to throw herself into a gumshoe investigation that Professor Fernando Rodríguez Lafuente, member of the jury who presented the prize to Montero, has described as “a vertiginous reading that seems written by a postmodern Agatha Christie.” Montero prefers not to discuss any spoilers: “All I can say is that I wanted to talk about absence, about the way you have to restructure your life after the disappearance of someone you love.”

Read more here El Confidencial