La losa de un secreto

He kept a secret. He didn't confess his sin. He committed 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 education she received. The Gamell and Ripoll families carried secrets, guilt, and irreparable losses. Years later, in 1975, Maurice received a letter from an unknown sender in Argentina. Its contents raised a question whose weight he would bear for the rest of his life. As a young man, he conceived a novel—God of Fifth Avenue—which he never finished, for fear of what it posited: that hidden powers pulled the strings of politics, not only in Spain, but throughout the world. The Burden of a Secret is a multi-layered fiction that, starting in Republican Catalonia and post-war Madrid, reaches into the present day, intertwining real and invented events in a suspenseful plot of revelations. A relentless realism constructs a collage of intrigue, local customs, impossible loves, fear of the truth, pandemic confinement, and loneliness in old age. A story that offers no respite from its very first pages.