Seville, present day. A gray archival box. A manuscript no one was expecting to find.When Roberto Alvarado, a historian of colonial Latin America, is summoned to the Archivo de Indias, he finds what appears to be an unpublished manuscript in the hand of Bartolomé de las Casas — the sixteenth-century Dominican friar who witnessed the Spanish conquest of the Americas and spent fifty years bearing witness to its destruction. The manuscript is structured as a series of probanzas, legal testimonies: Las Casas accounting, in precise and merciless prose, for what he saw and failed to stop.But Las Casas did not write alone. Between his probanzas, other voices surface: Xara, a woman from Hispaniola moving through a household that does not see her. Caimán, running from the massacre at Caonao. Rodrigo Cuneo, a translator who serves two masters and belongs to neither. Aj Xpiyakok, a Maya daykeeper recording what must survive. Tezozomoc, a Nahua scribe burning his own writing to protect it. Citlali Tozani, doing the work that history will not record.As Roberto translates the manuscript across a year in Seville, a discovery in a different gray box changes everything he thought he was studying. The history he has spent twenty years holding at the appropriate professional distance begins to move.The Book of Laments is a novel about testimony and its limits — about who gets to speak for whom, what the archive preserves and what it erases, and what a person does when they discover they are living inside the very history they have spent their life studying. It is, above all, a novel about the people the record cannot hold.For readers of Hilary Mantel, Yaa Gyasi, and Eduardo Galeano: a masterwork of colonial reckoning.
