García Márquez and Vargas Llosa met at the Caracas airport in August 1967. At just thirty-one years old, Vargas Llosa was already a critically acclaimed writer. García Márquez, having turned forty, was finally achieving publishing success with One Hundred Years of Solitude, published that year in Buenos Aires. Before embracing at the Caracas airport, a moment that formally marked the beginning of their friendship, the two literary geniuses had exchanged letters and read each other's work with admiration. They became close friends, neighbors in the Sarrià neighborhood of Barcelona, ​​and even godfathers to each other's children. In 1971, Vargas Llosa published a book in homage to García Márquez, titled History of a Deicide. Against all odds, the friendship soured and was forever damaged. In February 1976, Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in a Mexico City theater, knocking him to the ground and leaving him stunned, with a black eye and a broken nose, while saying, "This is for what you did to Patricia." What did García Márquez do to Patricia Llosa, Mario's wife? Why did Vargas Llosa punch García Márquez? What intimate circumstances corrupted that seemingly unbreakable friendship? Why didn't they meet or speak to each other for decades? Why did they become irreconcilable enemies, incapable of forgiving each other, despite the efforts of their literary agent, Carmen Balcells? The Geniuses, Jaime Bayly's most ambitious and fascinating novel, recreates with formidable narrative vigor the glorious years in which García Márquez and Vargas Llosa were great friends and explores, from the liberties of fiction, the secrets, the felonies, the denunciations and the volcanic angers that thunderously dynamited that friendship that seemed unbreakable.