“[A] stirring song of freedom.” ―Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa
From a renowned prize-winning Argentinian author comes a historical novel based on the true story of one man’s faith, spirit, and resistance during the Spanish Inquisition in Latin America.
Born in sixteenth-century Argentina, Francisco Maldonado da Silva is nine years old when he sees his father, Don Diego, arrested one harrowing afternoon because of his beliefs. Raised in a family practicing its Jewish faith in secret under the condemning eyes of the Spanish Inquisition, Francisco embarks on a personal quest that will challenge, enlighten, and forever change him.
He completes his education in a monastery; he reads the Bible; he dreams of reparation; he dedicates his life to science, developing a humanistic approach and becoming one of the first accredited medical doctors in Latin America; and most of all, he longs to reconnect with his father in Lima, Perú, the City of Kings.
So begins Francisco’s epic journey to fight for his true faith, to embrace his past, and to draw from his father’s indomitable strength in the face of unimaginable persecution. But the arm of the Holy Inquisition is an intractable one. As it reaches for Francisco, he sheds his mask to defend his freedom. Against seemingly insurmountable odds, he will prove that while the body can be broken, the spirit fights back, endures, and survives.
Marcos Aguinis is a prize-winning, internationally bestselling author. Born the son of European Jewish immigrants in Argentina in 1935, Aguinis learned at age seven that his grandfather and the rest of his family in Europe had been killed by the Nazis. Describing this as the defining moment of his life, Aguinis says it is what drove him to write, in an effort to repair the “broken mechanism of humanity.” He published his first book in 1963 and since then has published thirteen novels, fourteen essay collections, four short-story collections, and two biographies covering historical, political, and artistic themes. Aguinis was the first author outside of Spain to win the prestigious Planeta Prize for his book The Inverted Cross, and his novel Against the Inquisition was praised by Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa as a “stirring song of freedom.” When democracy was reinstated in Argentina in 1983, Aguinis became secretary of culture, for his brave fight against dictatorship and the defense of human rights, and sponsored the renowned “cultural renaissance.” For more information, visit www.aguinis.net.
About the Translator
Carolina De Robertis is a writer, professor, and literary translator of Uruguayan origins. She is the author of the novels The Gods of Tango and Perla, as well as the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain, and is also the editor of the anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times. Her own books have been translated into seventeen languages. Her award-winning translations from the Spanish include Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, Roberto Ampuero’s The Neruda Case, and writings by Raquel Lubartowski, Rodrigo Hasbún, and Pedro Almodóvar, among others. She is the recipient of Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Stonewall Book Award, and numerous other honors. In 2017, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts named De Robertis to its 100 List of writers and thinkers who are “shaping the future of culture.” She teaches fiction and literary translation at San Francisco State University.
