The Creator's Map » (Bargain)

Emilio Calderón is a historian, editor and author. He is the founder of Editorial Cirene, a publishing house in Spain. In 1995 he began writing young- adult fiction. In 2003, Calderón received the Valle-Inclán Fellowship of the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome. The result was The Creator's Map, his first novel for adults, the translation rights to which have been sold in more than twenty countries. He lives in Málaga.

Through the eyes of a Spanish architect in Rome, the dark period surrounding the rise and fall of Fascism roars to life as the architect, a passionate young librarian, and an Italian prince become entangled in a web of intrigue, love, and deceit involving a fateful map whose secrets have the power to destroy them.

Fascism is on the rise. Jose and his wife Montse wait out the Spanish Civil War at the Spanish Academy in Rome. When they sell an ancient text found in the Academy's forgotten archive, they become embroiled in a Nazi plot to collect mystical artifacts for the practice of the black arts. Most coveted by the Fuhrer himself: the Creator's Map, a document showing the power centers of the universe, said to be traced by God's own hand.

Publishers Weekly

A Nazi quest for an ancient map pinpointing the source of black magic, Vatican spies and Spanish Civil War refugees in 1930s Rome fail to coalesce and pay off in Calderón's intriguing debut. In late 1937, Jose Maria Hurtado de Mendoza, an apolitical Spanish architectural student at Rome's Spanish Academy, is recruited by a mysterious antifascist organization called Smith (all its agents are "Smith") to help search for the mystical Creator's Map, sought by the Nazis to aid in evildoing. He soon finds himself part of a love triangle with Montse, a beautiful young Spanish refugee, and Prince Junio Valerio Cima Vivarini, a Venetian paleographer secretly working with the SS. While Jose attempts to survive in fascist Italy and Germany, where he goes to work as an architect of bunkers and fortifications, the map's mystical qualities are relegated to the background. An ingenious denouement, set in 1952 and narrated in epistolary fashion by one character from beyond the grave, doesn't make up for the fact that Jose remains a passive and oftentimes peripheral figure in his own less than dramatic story. (July)

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