LOSA DE UN SECRETO, LA

He kept a secret. He didn't confess his sin. He committed a sacrilege. Maurice Gamell Ripoll was born in Madrid in 1947. His father, Ferran--a Catalan Republican teacher--moved to the capital after the Civil War to rebuild his life as a bookseller. In 1942, he married Rosana Ripoll, the daughter of a Francoist general. Rosana had to navigate the constraints and prohibitions of the upbringing she received. The Gamells and the Ripolls carried secrets, guilt, and irreparable losses. Years later, in 1975, Maurice receives a letter from a stranger in Argentina. Its contents raise a question whose weight he will carry for the rest of his life. As a young man, he conceived a novel--*God of Fifth Avenue*--that he never finished, for fear of what it posited in its pages: that hidden powers were pulling the strings of politics, not only in Spain, but throughout the world. The Burden of a Secret is an ensemble novel that, spanning Republican Catalonia and postwar Madrid, reaches the present day, interweaving real and fictional events in a plot of suspense-filled revelations. Uncompromising realism constructs a collage of intrigue, local color, impossible loves, fear of the truth, pandemic lockdown, and loneliness in old age. A story that offers no respite from its very first pages.