IN THE YEARS BEFORE THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION, Mexico is ruled by a tiny, elite that apes European culture enriches itself from foreign investment and prizes racial purity. The majority of Mexicans, who are mestizo, or of mixed European and native blood, are condemned to poverty. Presiding over this corrupt system is the aging dictator, Porfirio Diaz, President of the Republic. Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city's destitute. This unlikely pair--he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian--will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, Jose, readers follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath. MICHAEL NAVA is the author of an acclaimed series of seven crime novels featuring gay, Mexican-American criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios. The Rios novels have won seven Lambda Literary awards and Nava was called by The New York Times, "one of our best." In 2001, he was awarded the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in LGBT Literature. A native Californian and the grandson of Mexican immiarants he divides his time between San Francisco and Palm Springs.

ISBN: 9781612941950