In the Last Blue

In the Last Blue by Carme Riera. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781585678532.

During the Spanish Inquisition on the island of Majorca, a small enclave of local Jews--all of whom have been baptized as Christians--determine to escape detention in the Inquisition by escaping to lands of freedom across the Atlantic. But weather frustrates their flight, and eventually thirty-seven of them were captured and condemned to burn at the stake in the Auto-de-Fe. In prose at once lyrical and suspenseful, Riera recreates the lives of Majorcan Jews in the seventeenth century--in a world of inquisitors, aristocrats, merchants, farmers, and soldiers--in a lush mosaic of history and period detail, religion and cultural lore. Already acclaimed around the world, In the Last Blue is at once a beautiful, poetic, riveting, and devastating tale of hope and fear.