ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA has twice been awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura in Spain in addition to winning the Prix Femina in France. He lives in Madrid and New York.
EDITH GROSSMAN is the acclaimed translator of, among others, Cervantes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2006 she was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.
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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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