Conspiración en Londres

He had just been defeated. Manuel Belgrano, the general who had earned everyone's admiration, was going through one of his worst moments. The resounding defeats at the battles of Vilcapugio and Ayohuma had left him in a precarious position, not only politically. Abandoned to his fate and far from glory, he was at the mercy of whatever the powerful figures of the past decided about him—those who knew little to nothing about the tragedies of the battlefield. He had no choice: prison and public scorn awaited him, or he could blindly accept the mission entrusted to him by the Buenos Aires government in the Old World. He said yes. But he never imagined that what lay ahead was one of the most outlandish missions in the history of the Río de la Plata, and that his traveling companion would be the ever-ambiguous Bernardino Rivadavia. In this hallucinatory drift, which would begin in imperial Rio de Janeiro and continue in Regency London, he would have to contend head-on with Lord Strangford, Manuel de Sarratea, the buffoonish Count Domingo Cabarrús, and a whole host of shadowy figures, architects of the darkest intrigues. Journeys, plots, betrayals, fleeting loves, loyalties that last only a breath, and others sealed in blood. With one foot in a real event—the affair known as “the Italian Affair”—and the other in the speculations of what might have been, Felipe Pigna’s debut novel reads with the pulse of a spy thriller and the attention that great historical figures always demand. For this reason, Conspiracy in London is a unique novel, a book that only one of Argentina’s most renowned historians could have written.