The Papyrus of Nebamun

Luxor, October 1921. A Mexican archaeologist who has spent sixteen years digging in the Valley of the Kings buys a papyrus from a market stall-and finds inside it the voice of Nebamun, Second Prophet of Amun, writing in the last days of Tutankhamun's world. What Nebamun set down was not a temple record. It was a confession: his forbidden love for Iaret, a woman bound to the palace, in a season when power, faith, and fear decided every life. As Howard Carter's men close in on the sixteen steps that will make 1922 famous, Miguel translates line by line, and the two men - separated by three thousand years - begin to write the same book. Between Pharaonic Egypt and the Egypt of the excavations, Rubens Marcelo Souza Leite has built a novel of atmosphere, memory, and mystery. The papyrus becomes a passage between centuries, between desire and ruin, presence and disappearance-and reveals that some lives find shelter only when they turn into writing.This edition includes an Egyptological Notebook of nineteen sections and an index of people, gods, places, and concepts.