El contrabando ejemplar
Pablo Maurette

NOVEL | 2025 | 344 pages

WINNER OF THE 2025 HERRALDE NOVEL PRIZE


A celebration of the personal and the collective that turns the act of storytelling into a unique and moving literary experience. A novel that finds its place within the tradition of the best Latin American writing.

Pablo, an aspiring writer without many hesitations, travels to Madrid to recover the manuscript his friend and mentor Eduardo left behind when he died. It's a book Eduardo never finished that attempted to explain the unexplainable: the unfortunate fate of Argentina, which shaped its economy during the 17th century with a clandestine trade system known as "exemplary contraband." 

Determined to take over Eduardo's impossible novel (a literary undertaking that is simultaneously a tribute and an atonement, a looting and an elegy), Pablo will face a process that will lead him to reconstruct his own biography as well as Eduardo's: a Peronist who was over the top and sentimental, a boundless figure characterized by contradictions and melancholy. Among its pages are characters that are pulsing with intensity: Aunt Chiquita and the enigmatic Teruca; Pietro Malaspina, the first Italian who set foot in Río de la Plata; Zebulão Mendes, a Jewish convert doctor; and the Querandí monster, a grotesque folkloric figure whose curse seems to loom over Argentina.

Neurotic, tender, violent, and humorous, they all come together in a mosaic where history, imagination, and the sentimental chronicling of Argentine identity merge together. Neither a nostalgic ode to memory nor a historical reconstruction, El contrabando ejemplar is a novel that questions the meaning of what is lost and what is invented.

RIGHTS: spanish ANAGRAMA

“A family saga, an impossible detective story, and the outline of a country’s history and its old and incurable affliction. With these elements and several unforgettable characters, El contrabando ejemplar provides an answer to the question of what it means to belong to a particular place, a culture, and a past with powerful imagination and sharp humor. And perhaps the best novel about any subject is the one that is written while seemingly seeking something else.”
— Gonzalo Pontón Gijón, Herralde Prize juror
“The proverbial Argentine verbosity is on full display, brought to life by a gallery of eccentric characters who weave together a delirious and provocative interpretation of the country’s history. An overwhelmingly funny novel.”
— Juan Pablo Villalobos, Herralde Prize juror
“Both centrifugal and completely centripetal, El contrabando ejemplar is a delightful journey through our historical and personal fictions, through the anomalous, monstrous, and hybrid nature of people, cultures, literatures, and countries. In this never-ending tale, a story is pure hope, an essential condition for human existence, joy, invention, and life itself.”
— Marta Sanz, Herralde Prize juror
“‘Where did Argentina go wrong?’ What history cannot answer, literature investigates, twists, invents, and speculates upon. In El contrabando ejemplar, this question—ambitious, mischievous, and controversial—serves as both the narrative’s driving force and blind spot. With intelligence and courage, Maurette draws on and subverts literary tradition. The intimate merges with the historical and social, and desire advances in the form of storytelling because, as long as there is a story, the world can still be ordered. ‘For someone like me with no children, all my desire is put into literature,’ says Pablo, Pablito, the narrator. That desire has brought an exemplary form of contraband into Argentine literature: this incredibly insightful novel.”
— Cecilia Fanti, Herralde Prize juror