The Conquest - Hardcover

Maya Murray, Yxta

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060093595 ISBN 13: 9780060093594

Publisher: Rayo, 2002

Synopsis

A perfect combination of history, passion, imagination and scholarship, Yxta Maya Murray's The Conquest pulses with the intangible essence that separates the books we love from the few that forever imprint themselves in our minds.

A restorer of rare books and manuscripts, Sara Gonzales lives in a solitary world filled with dusty broken books. A born reader, Sara is doing with her life just what she set out to do, even at the expense of true love.

When Sara is assigned to restore a banned and scandal-filled sixteenth century book called The Conquest, she does not yet know that the story will consume her, intellectually and emotionally, causing her to reevaluate her own sense of history as well as to question the decisions that have brought her to where she now finds herself.

Reputed to have been written by a notorious Spanish monk, The Conquest recounts the fantastic sexual adventures of an Aztec princess enslaved by Cortés after his conquest of what is now modern-day Mexico. Sent to Europe so that she may perform before the aristocracy, the princess soon becomes all the rage at court, an artist's muse, and a mortal danger to those who destroyed her world. Enthralled by the tale, Sara suspects that no monk wrote it, and she plunges into the mystery of the book's origin.

As Sara swims through the archives of the famed Getty Museum, the book captures more than just her curiosity. It becomes a cultural allegory of her own existence. In her own life, Sara has not resolved the conflicts of her broken family. While her father refuses to remember the past, she cannot forget her mother's untimely death. Sara's painful history that threatens her romance with the man she's always loved. It is The Conquest that leads Sara to an understanding of what she values most.

Filled with swashbuckling adventure and scholarly mystery, as well as a deep sense of our connection to history and its fallibility, The Conquest reminds us that books exist not only as doorways to other worlds, but also to help guide us toward discovering who we are and what we dare dream to one day become. A book for book lovers, The Conquest is Yxta Maya Murray’s finest and most ambitious novel yet.

About this title

About the Author

Yxta Maya Murray is the author of The Conquest—winner of the Whiting Award—and The King's Gold, the second novel in her acclaimed Red Lion series. She is a professor at Loyola Law School and lives in Los Angeles.

From Publishers Weekly

Moving away from the urban barrio settings of her previous works, Murray (Locas; What It Takes to Get to Vegas) entwines the tales of two Latin American women separated by centuries in her third novel. Sara Gonzales is a rare-book restorer at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. While working on a 16th-century manuscript, she becomes engrossed in its story of an Aztec woman captured by Cort‚s and sent to Europe to entertain the pope. The narrator of the manuscript, "Helen," describes her encounters with the painter Titian, for whom she served as a muse; her many female lovers, including the adored Caterina, a bluestocking nun; and her ever-burning desire to avenge the deaths of her own people by assassinating Cort‚s, the pope and Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor. Sara's boss and the scholarly community consider the manuscript to be a work of fiction, but Sara believes otherwise-and endeavors to prove Helen's existence and authorship. Meanwhile, there is the issue of Sara's on-again, off-again relationship with Karl, the man she has loved since high school, who is set to marry another woman because Sara has never been able to fully commit. Sara's life, so claustrophobically focused on her work, stands in effective contrast to Helen's swashbuckling escapades across Mediterranean Europe; Sara's quest for personal satisfaction-as well as her thoughtful musings on history and her own sense of displacement as a Latina-are echoed on a grand scale in Helen's encounters with the Europeans. The subplot about Sara's literary sleuthing ties the two stories neatly together and gives the book a satisfying edge of suspense.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rayo
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0060093595
• ISBN 13: 9780060093594
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304