Ardis Lowney

Set in Portugal during the opening years of the Second World War, Breath of the Adamastor follows three lives drawn together by secrecy, faith, and quiet acts of courage in a country balanced between neutrality and conflict. Canadian biologist Ardis Lowney arrives in Lisbon determined to pursue research on the endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtle, even as war tightens its grip on Europe. Her work brings her south to Portugal's rugged coast, where scientific purpose coexists uneasily with political surveillance and unspoken danger. In the north, Carlos, a Catholic priest deeply shaped by the miracles of Fátima, accepts a church assignment that conceals its true intent amid the strategic importance of wolfram mining. Meanwhile, Xisco, a young stable hand, earns extra money collecting rocks for foreign buyers, unaware of the forces gathering around his rural village. As these characters move through intersecting moral landscapes, the novel explores the ways ordinary people respond to extraordinary circumstances-through loyalty, compromise, belief, and resilience. Their choices unfold against a meticulously researched historical backdrop that brings wartime Portugal vividly to life. This second edition of Breath of the Adamastor, newly titled and revised, is a literary historical novel concerned less with spectacle than with conscience, human connection, and the search for meaning in an uncertain world.