Book of Laments: A Novel of the Priest Who Fought the Spanish Conquest: Bartolomé de las Casas - Couverture souple

Gomez, Ricardo

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798251055238

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

Seville, present day. A gray archival box. A manuscript no one was expecting to find.

When Roberto Alvarado, a Mexican-American historian of colonial Latin America, is summoned to the Archivo de Indias, he finds what appears to be an unpublished manuscript in the hand of Bartolomé de las Casas — the sixteenth-century Dominican friar who witnessed the Spanish conquest of the Americas and spent fifty years bearing witness to its destruction. Structured as a series of probanzas, the legal testimonies of his era, the manuscript is Las Casas in his final years: accounting, in precise and merciless prose, for what he saw and failed to stop.

But Las Casas did not write alone. Between his testimonies, other voices surface — the voices the archive has no room for:

• Xara, a woman from Hispaniola moving through a household that does not see her
• Caimán, running from the massacre at Caonao with no destination except away
• Rodrigo Cuneo, a translator who serves two masters and belongs to neither
• Aj Xpiyakok, a Maya daykeeper recording what must be preserved
• Tezozomoc, a Nahua scribe burning his own writing to protect it
• Citlali Tozani, doing the work that history will not record

As Roberto translates the manuscript across a year in Seville, a discovery in a different gray box changes everything he thought he was studying. The history he has spent two decades holding at the appropriate professional distance — through the archival cotton gloves he put on himself — begins, at last, to move.

The Book of Laments is a novel about testimony and its limits: about who speaks for whom, what the archive preserves and what it erases, and what it costs a person to discover they have been living inside the very history they have spent their life studying. It is, above all, a novel about the people the record cannot hold.

For readers of Yaa Gyasi, Hilary Mantel, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Eduardo Galeano.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798251055238
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 179
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg