In the Last Blue

During the Spanish Inquisition on the island of Majorca, a small enclave of local Jews--all of whom have been baptized as Christians--determine to escape detention in the Inquisition by escaping to lands of freedom across the Atlantic. But weather frustrates their flight, and eventually thirty-seven of them were captured and condemned to burn at the stake in the Auto-de-Fe. In prose at once lyrical and suspenseful, Riera recreates the lives of Majorcan Jews in the seventeenth century--in a world of inquisitors, aristocrats, merchants, farmers, and soldiers--in a lush mosaic of history and period detail, religion and cultural lore. Already acclaimed around the world, In the Last Blue is at once a beautiful, poetic, riveting, and devastating tale of hope and fear.

Carme Riera was born in Palma, Mallorca, in 1948 and is a professor of Spanish literature at Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has been awarded a number of prizes, including the Prudenci Bertrana, the Ramon Llull Prize, and, for In the Last Blue, the Josep Pla Prize, the Joan Crexells Prize, the Lletra dí Or Prize, the Ministry of Culture National Prize for Narrative, and the Elio Vittorini Prize from the Syracuse Department of Tourism. In the year 2000, the Government of Catalonia awarded Riera the Saint George Cross.