This accomplished novel by best-selling author Michael Mewshaw encapsulates the contemporary European epoch within an artists’ retreat in Granada, with remnants of the Islamic era, the Crusades, and the Inquisition still coloring and agitating 21st century life there—as well as an unwelcome intrusion by the American CIA.
Migrants of various sorts—an African youth escaping poverty only to rediscover it in Spain, a blasphemous Algerian professor facing a fatwa, a renowned yet controversial New York artist with her own dark secrets, and the quasi-American proprietor—people this vivid tale, set in the town’s historic Albaicin district. Each character searches for identity on a fluid and treacherous cultural, spiritual, and geopolitical stage, each a masked performer.
Through their dilemmas in this European microcosm where politics, history, and sexual dynamics clash, we are gifted a fascinating layered look at diverse and driven people, each struggling to find for themself a home—a struggle that is the source of all great fiction, says Arthur Miller.
