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About
It's the late sixties, the last dark years of Franco's dictatorship: Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuel's country estate in the small town of Mágina to write his thesis on an old friend of Manuel's, an obscure republican poet named Jacinto Solana. The country house is full of traces of the poet-notes, photographs, journals-and Minaya soon discovers that, thirty years earlier, during the Spanish Civil War, both his uncle and Solana were in love with the same woman, the beautiful, unsettling Mariana. Engaged to Manuel, she was shot in the attic of the house on her wedding night. With the aid of Inés, a maid, Minaya begins to search for Solana's lost masterpiece, a novel called Beatus Ille. Looking for a book, he unravels a crime.
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Reviews
"Shame and guilt, homelands and exile, ceaseless wanderings and bitter alienations both internal and external, metaphorical and real, are persistent motifs of Muñoz Molina's remarkable novel-one that turns out to be about a territory far vaster than 'Sepharad' itself: Europe, perhaps even the world . . . [A] masterpiece."
Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Review of Books
"A magnificent novel about the iniquity and horror of fanaticism, and especially the human being's indestructible spirit."
Mario Vargas Llosa