Historical Fiction
Historical Fiction
Embedded Files
The Past Is Never Past
Richly researched novels spanning five centuries and four continents
Ricardo Gómez's historical novels are driven by a single conviction: understanding where we came from is inseparable from understanding who we are. Drawing on decades of research across Latin American, European, and American history, his fiction restores forgotten voices to the record — indigenous leaders, colonial rebels, Cornish miners, independence heroes, and Pacific Northwest settlers building a world at the edge of a continent.
Pacific Northwest
Pacific Northwest
Where Two Waters Meet
Where Two Waters Meet
Port Townsend, Washington, 1851. Two waters meet here — the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound — and for a few decades, the men who arrived first were certain this would be the greatest city on the Pacific Coast. They platted streets that still exist, built brick buildings that still stand, and filed claims on land they had no right to take.
The S'Klallam and Chemakum peoples had lived at this confluence for thousands of years before the treaties — treaties signed under pressure, in languages the signatories did not speak, ceding territories they had no framework for imagining as ownable. Where Two Waters Meet tells the story of Port Townsend's founding years through witnesses on both sides of that transaction: the settlers who believed they were building civilization, and the people who watched their world being renamed.
A novel rooted in the place where Ricardo Gómez now lives and writes — and in the history that the town's Victorian facades have always been covering.
Paperback, Kindle & Audiobook https://mybook.to/WhereTwoWatersMeet
Forthcoming:
The Cedar Chest
Forthcoming:
The Cedar Chest
In the summer of 2024, a retired attorney discovered a cedar chest in a family cabin on Mitkof Island, Alaska. Inside: the complete file from United States of America v. James Brennan, Case No. 559-KB, District of Alaska, 1918–1919. Depositions. Affidavits. A coerced newspaper retraction. A bond inventory listing everything a man owned. A dismissal order that cleared his name and apologized for nothing.
He brought the chest to a novelist's lecture in Port Townsend in February 2026. The novelist was Roberto Gomez — Nicaraguan, a reader of Sergio Ramírez, someone who recognized in the file's grammar of passive constructions and scattered witnesses a pattern he had seen in other archives, in other countries, in other centuries.
The novel that resulted is built entirely from the documents in that chest. Five women — June Edwards, Gene White, Margaret Perry, Georgie Waldon, and Ora Gordan — returned to Alaska in September 1918 to testify under oath about the night of July 23rd. The Cedar Chest is the account of how those words survived, what they contain, and why they still matter.
Medieval Spain
Medieval Spain
Medieval Spain was the most intellectually fertile place in the Western world — a crossroads where Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars translated the accumulated wisdom of antiquity into the languages that would fuel the Renaissance. Ricardo Gómez's Iberian novels live inside that world: the alliances that made it possible, the forces that destroyed it, and the people who refused to let the knowledge disappear.
The Translators of Toledo
The Translators of Toledo
The Translators of Toledo (trilogy) Toledo, 1080–1108. Three families — a Jewish astronomer, a Muslim navigator, a Mozarab Christian scholar — forge a secret covenant to preserve the knowledge of ages as Christian reconquest reshapes Spain forever. Across three novels, their children carry that covenant forward through crusade, invasion, and betrayal, encoding wisdom in embroidery patterns and navigator's charts, smuggling manuscripts to safety beneath the noses of those who would burn them. Each volume includes a scholarly historical essay bridging fiction and rigorous research.
If you enjoyed The Name of the Rose, The Pillars of the Earth, or People of the Book — this trilogy is for you.
Toledo, 1080. Alfonso VI's Christian armies are closing in, and Jewish astronomer Abraham Cohen has read the catastrophe in the stars. As the siege tightens, he forges an unlikely alliance with Yusuf al-Qurtubi, a Muslim navigator haunted by his years at sea, and Diego Medina, a Mozarab Christian scholar caught between two worlds. Together with their families — including a physician who defies the boundaries placed on women and three children whose friendship crosses every divide — they create a secret covenant to preserve the manuscripts and scientific knowledge that political and religious powers would see destroyed. Toledo falls. The promises of tolerance begin to crumble. But the covenant holds. [Kindle $7.99 · Paperback $15.00 · Kindle Unlimited → https://mybook.to/CityofThreeFaiths]
Toledo, 1086. Archbishop Bernard arrives with a mandate to purge "infidel learning" from the city. But in the shadow of converted mosques and watched streets, the covenant has other plans. As the famous School of Translators takes shape under unlikely Church patronage, Abraham, Yusuf, Diego, and their children walk a razor's edge — satisfying suspicious clerics while smuggling philosophical texts to safety, encoding medical knowledge in women's embroidery patterns, calculating routes to lands beyond any map. When a zealous monk begins investigating their activities, they face an impossible choice: abandon their life's work, or risk everything they love. Set against the First Crusade and the Almoravid invasion, this is the trilogy at full force. [Kindle $7.99 · Paperback $15.00 · Kindle Unlimited → https://mybook.to/SchoolOfTranslators]
Toledo, 1108. King Alfonso VI is dying. The fragile peace that allowed Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars to work together is cracking under the weight of Queen Urraca's troubled reign and her husband's ambitions. Abraham Cohen, now in his final years, races to complete his Testament — a philosophical foundation for knowledge preservation meant to guide future generations through crises he will not live to see. When betrayal strikes from within their own ranks and the Chamber of Echoes falls to soldiers, the covenant scatters across three continents. But Abraham has embedded one final, audacious contingency in his Testament: navigator Yusuf's revolutionary calculations suggesting lands beyond the western ocean — knowledge that may one day guide refugees to shores no European map has yet marked. [Kindle $7.99 · Paperback $15.00 · Kindle Unlimited → https://mybook.to/SeedsForTheFuture]
The Andalusian Covenant
The Andalusian Covenant
Granada, 1492. As the last Muslim stronghold falls to Catholic forces, four unlikely conspirators hatch an audacious plan: steal Columbus's navigational secrets and sail west, carrying the accumulated wisdom of eight centuries of coexistence in Al-Andalus to whatever lies beyond the Atlantic. Ibrahim al-Zarqali, a physician whose healing arts cross every religious boundary. Samuel Cohen, an astronomer whose calculations rival any court scholar. Zahra al-Rundi, sole survivor of Ronda's brutal conquest, carrying secrets that could save or damn them all. And Ismail al-Qurtubi, a naval commander tasked with navigating the truly impossible. Their expedition carries more than refugees — it carries the Andalusian Covenant itself, a document imagining a society where Islamic mathematics converses with Aztec astronomy, where Jewish physicians learn from Taíno healers, where leadership depends on knowledge rather than bloodline or creed. From the courts of Tenochtitlan to the highlands of the Inca, this is alternate history at its most ambitious: a sweeping epic that asks what 1492 could have meant, and what it still might.
A companion novel to The Translators of Toledo trilogy — the descendants of Toledo's covenant, carrying its promise into the New World.
Historical Fantasy
Title in Spanish: El Pacto Andalusí
Audiobook - Kindle - Paperback
English → https://mybook.to/AndalusianCovenant
Spanish → https://mybook.to/PactoAndalusi
The Paper Crown
The Paper Crown
Spain, 1490. In the shadow of the Inquisition, Jewish merchant Gonzalo Palencia signs his family's conversion papers — knowing that the documents that save them will also erase them. What the Church cannot see, it cannot burn. So begins a legacy of three ledgers: one for officials, one for allies, one for truths that must never be found. His daughter Mariana inherits the weight of impossible choices. His grandson Juan carries forged papers across the Atlantic to the mountains of Nueva Granada, where he discovers that Colombia's indigenous peoples have been hiding their own truths in plain sight for generations. And Juan's son Cristóbal, born into all three worlds at once, must weave them together before colonial suspicion tears everything apart. In present-day Bogotá, a woman named Cuchu — tracing her Spanish citizenship application — discovers a tarnished silver ring in her grandmother's belongings and realizes the paper trail was never just bureaucracy. It was survival, encoded in margins and margins, waiting five hundred years to be read.
Historical Fiction
Title in Spanish: La Corona de Papel
Kindle - Paperback - Audiobook
English → https://mybook.to/PaperCrown
Spanish → https://mybook.to/CoronaDePapel
The Book of Laments
The Book of Laments
A novel about the priest who fought the Spanish conquest: Fray Bartolomé de las Casas
A historian working in the Archivo General de Indias examines an uncatalogued manuscript from a private donation — what may be an autograph manuscript of Bartolomé de las Casas's Historia de las Indias, organized not as the published version scholars have relied on for a century and a half, but as a series of probanzas or legal testimonies, gathered from witnesses across five decades of Spanish colonization in the Americas.
The testimonies span the full arc of Las Casas's life and conscience: Hispaniola, 1502–1511. Cuba, 1513. Spain, 1515–1522. Guatemala, 1537. Mexico, the 1540s. Valladolid, 1550 and 1563. The witnesses include a Taíno woman on Hispaniola who watches her world disappear; a Mayan priest in Guatemala who receives Dominican friars into his community; an Aztec elder in Mexico; and the Spanish colonists, priests, and crown officials who carried out, argued over, and occasionally resisted what was being done. At the center of all of them is Las Casas himself — the young priest who arrived in the New World with an encomienda and a clear conscience, and who spent the next fifty years becoming the most sustained indictment that any participant in the colonial enterprise ever produced.
→ English: https://mybook.to/BookOfLaments
Próximamente en Español El Libro de los Lamentos): [mybook.to/LibroDeLamentos] (forthcoming)
Colombian Independence
Colombian Independence
Three novels recovering the heroes of Colombia's fight for independence — their lives, contradictions, and legacies.
Three novels — written in Spanish — recovering the heroes of Colombia's fight for independence. Each restores a figure that official history has minimized, distorted, or erased. The first two are co-authored with Colombian scholars; all three are grounded in deep historical research.
Echoes of liberty:
Antonio Nariño and the birth of Colombia
Echoes of liberty:
Antonio Nariño and the birth of Colombia
(with Mauricio Beltrán)
Una noche de 1793, un hombre arriesgó todo por una idea. Antonio Nariño tenía fortuna, posición y una familia que adoraba — pero cuando sus manos tocaron las páginas de la Declaración de los Derechos del Hombre, supo que su vida cambiaría para siempre. What began as a clandestine translation in the dim light of his printing press became the spark that ignited a continent. Told through the voices of those who loved him, followed him, and lost him — his wife Magdalena who kept the flame of resistance burning while he languished in prison, the mestizo musician who built a spy network through melody, the freed slave who became a soldier of liberty — this is not just the story of a hero. It is the story of what ideals cost when pursued to their final consequence: thirty years of imprisonment, a confiscated fortune, a wife dead in his absence, children divided by war.
English & Spanish
Kindle - Paperback
Title in Spanish: Antonio Nariño: Ecos de Libertad: Antonio Nariño y el Nacimiento de Colombia
Spanish: https://mybook.to/EcosDeLibertad
English: https://mybook.to/EchoesOfLiberty
Manuelita Sáenz:
The Untamed Liberator
Manuelita Sáenz:
The Untamed Liberator
Quito, 1797: a girl marked by the scandal of her birth is locked in a convent. But behind stone walls, among forbidden books and dreams of freedom, a revolutionary is born. Lima, 1822: a woman married to a respectable Englishman abandons everything — fortune, reputation, security — for a man and a cause: Simón Bolívar and the independence of the Americas. Bogotá, 1828: when conspirators come to kill the Liberator in the dead of night, only she stands in their way. With her body. With her voice. With her defiance. Narrated through unexpected voices — the streets of Quito that watched her grow, the letters that guarded her secrets, the window through which Bolívar escaped — this novel restores to Manuelita the place that was stolen from her: the center of her own story. Not the story of a woman who loved a hero. The story of a heroine history tried to erase.
English & Spanish
Kindle - Paperback
Title in Spanish: Manuelita Sáenz: Libertadora Indomable
Spanish:
https://mybook.to/ManuelitaSaenz
English: https://mybook.to/ManuelitaUntamed
José María Melo:
Warrior Without Borders
José María Melo:
Warrior Without Borders
(with Guillermo Padilla)
A controversial and complex figure that dominant Colombian historical narrative has vilified, whitewashed, and marginalized — this novel rescues him from oblivion. Of Pijao indigenous roots, Melo rose from the battlefields of independence to the presidency of Colombia, then fell into exile in Central America and Mexico.
This historical novel explores what official accounts omit: how his indigenous roots shaped his worldview, his internal conflict when he seized power by force, and his unbreakable commitment to the poor, the artisans, and the indigenous communities. Not a biography — a historical re-creation that illuminates the ideas and contributions of a contradictory and fascinating leader, offering a new perspective on a crucial period in the formation of Colombian and Latin American identity.
English & Spanish
Kindle - Paperback
Title in Spanish: José María Melo: Guerrero Sin Fronteras
Spanish: https://mybook.to/JMMeloGuerrero
English: https://mybook.to/JMMeloWarrier
The Cartographer's Daughter: The Atlas of Unwritten Futures
July 1822. The two men who freed South America from Spanish rule meet in secret. What they say to each other will shape a continent's destiny — and remains one of history's greatest mysteries. When her father is murdered by Spanish soldiers, María Suárez inherits an impossible gift: an atlas that shows not what will happen, but what could happen. Every choice branches into infinite possibilities. Every path carries its own price. Disguised as a male clerk, María infiltrates the armies of revolution, serving first the fiery visionary Simón Bolívar, then the methodical strategist José de San Martín — witness to their historic meeting in Guayaquil, the encounter that will determine whether a continent finds unity or shatters into fragments. But the atlas shows her a third possibility, hidden in ancient ruins older than the Inca, where something has been waiting centuries for this moment of convergence.
Historical Fantasy
Kindle - Paperback → English: https://mybook.to/CartographerDaughter
Political Historical Fiction
Political Historical Fiction
These three novels form a loose constellation around a single urgent question: how do freedom and democracy survive — or fail to survive — the people entrusted to protect them? Set in Nicaragua, a fictional Caribbean island nation, and Colombia across six decades, they move between intimate family drama and sweeping political history. Together they make the case that fiction can do something political analysis cannot: show us what it feels like from the inside when the unthinkable becomes normal.
The Comandante's Shadow
The Comandante's Shadow
In 1979, Daniel Ortega stood on a balcony in Managua promising democracy and justice to a nation finally free from dictatorship. Forty-six years later, that same palace is the center of a regime that eliminates opponents, silences critics, and rules through fear — all in the name of protecting the revolution.
Told through the eyes of an American teacher who witnessed Nicaragua's transformation firsthand, this gripping historical novel traces Ortega's journey from idealistic guerrilla fighter to authoritarian ruler: the literacy campaigns and land reform that gave way to surveillance networks; the sixteen years in opposition learning to make deals with former enemies; the constitutional manipulation and family dynasty; and the systematic elimination of anyone who still remembers what the revolution was supposed to achieve.
A devastating portrait of how liberators become oppressors — and how quickly the language of liberation becomes the vocabulary of repression.
"In our era of democratic backsliding worldwide, this novel serves as both warning and witness."
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook
Title in Spanish: La Sombra del Comandante
The Tides of Freedom:
The Slow Drowning of Democracy
The Tides of Freedom:
The Slow Drowning of Democracy
When democracy dies, it doesn't always fall with a crash. Sometimes it drowns — slowly, quietly, one policy at a time. On the Caribbean island nation of Puerto Libertad, constitutional scholar Sofía Domínguez watches in disbelief as a populist leader rises to power despite losing the popular vote.
What begins as political theater soon becomes something far darker: mass deportations, detention centers, journalists silenced, universities purged, citizens reclassified as "non-persons." As Sofía's own brother disappears into the regime's machinery, she must choose between the safety of academic neutrality and joining a dangerous resistance network of doctors, journalists, priests, and military officers who refuse to let democracy die without a fight. Written by a scholar of migration and society, this political thriller includes an analytical epilogue examining democratic backsliding in contemporary societies.
"Some things, once lost, can be found again. But only through courage, sacrifice, and the stubborn insistence that human dignity cannot be registered away." English · Includes analytical epilogue
Hermanos de Sangre
Hermanos de Sangre
Nicolás joined M-19. Carlos stayed.
That single sentence contains sixty years of Colombian history — and a family torn apart by it. Twin brothers born in Bogotá in the 1950s, inseparable through childhood, divided by the same political convulsions that divided their country. What begins as adolescent disagreement hardens into ideology, then estrangement, then decades of silence. One brother goes underground. The other builds a conventional life and tries not to think about what his twin is doing in the mountains.
Hermanos de Sangre traces the full arc: the years of guerrilla warfare, the attempted peace processes, the slow and unglamorous work of reconciliation that has no dramatic turning point, no single moment of forgiveness — just two aging men who share a face and almost nothing else, learning whether sixty years of damage can be undone. The borrachero tree appears here too: beautiful on the surface, toxic underneath. Like ideology. Like family loyalty. Like Colombia itself.
Spanish · Kindle - Paperback →
Spanish: https://mybook.to/HermanosDeSangre
Other Regional Historical Fiction
Other Regional Historical Fiction
Not every story begins in Colombia or medieval Spain. These two novels follow communities shaped by forces larger than any individual life — the industrial diaspora that scattered my wife's cornish mining ancestors to the U.S., and a Polynesian lineage carrying sacred knowledge through 170 years of colonial transformation. Different oceans, different centuries, different cultures. The same questions: what do we carry when the world that formed us changes beyond recognition, and what do we pass on?
Children of the Sacred Current
Children of the Sacred Current
Tahiti, 1850. A gift that passes through five generations of women. A hundred and seventy years of colonial history, nuclear testing, and digital transformation — witnessed by those who can feel the mana moving through everything.
When fifteen-year-old Vairaumati dives for pearls in waters her ancestors have known for generations, a sacred pearl chooses her — and with it, the ability to see the mana, the current of life-force flowing through all living things, as threads of light weaving through water, objects, and people. It is a gift that will pass through her bloodline for five generations, evolving with each daughter born into a changing world.
Spanning 170 years of Polynesian history, this sweeping saga follows the women of the Maeva line through the fall of the Tahitian monarchy, two World Wars, French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and the digital revolution that reaches even the most remote islands. From pearl diving in pristine lagoons to decoding satellite signals, from colonial resistance to cultural preservation in the internet age, it is a story about what we inherit, what we protect, and what we pass on.
Title in Spanish: Las Hijas de la Corriente Sagrada
Title in French: Les enfants du courant sacré
Paperback & Kindle
Spanish: https://mybook.to/HijasDeCorrienteSagrad
The Cousin Jacks
The Cousin Jacks
When the last tin mine in Cornwall closes, three brothers take different ships to different continents — one to the copper ranges of Upper Michigan, one to the gold fields of California, one to the silver mines of Guanajuato, Mexico. They carry with them the same skills, the same hymns, and the same unspoken question: what does it mean to be Cornish when Cornwall can no longer hold you?
Told across two generations and three countries, The Cousin Jacks follows what the diaspora built — communities tight enough to survive any mine disaster, clannish enough to make outsiders of their own children — and what it cost. The men who left Cornwall never stopped being Cornish. Their sons, born in Michigan or California or Mexico, never quite became anything else. The Cousin Jacks is a novel about the inheritance of identity across distance, and what gets lost in the crossing.
Kindle, Paperback & Audiobook -
English: https://mybook.to/CousinJacks
The Paris Game
The Paris Game
Roberto and Marianne Castellanos are celebrating their fifteenth wedding anniversary with a week in Paris — their first return since their chaotic honeymoon with all five children from their blended family. Roberto has just retired from teaching literature. Marianne retired early after a hiking accident changed how she sees the world through her camera lens. They're no longer the overwhelmed parents managing teenagers in the Louvre. But who are they now?
Like Cortázar's masterpiece, The Paris Game can be read two ways: sequentially for a complete, satisfying story, or following an embedded Anniversary Game navigation that reveals additional chapters exploring family history, creative awakenings, and the magical objects that witness long marriages. A love letter to Latin American literature, to the pleasures of long partnership, and to the magic that emerges when we remain open to wonder.
Literary fiction with magical realism
English & Spanish
Kindle - Paperback - Audiobook
English: https://mybook.to/ParisGame
Spanish: https://mybook.to/JuegoDeParis
Contemporary Literary Historical Fiction
Contemporary Literary Historical Fiction
Standalone novels that resist easy categorization — rooted in specific histories and geographies, yet concerned with questions that cut across time and place: who owns knowledge, what survives migration, how technology reshapes what it means to belong. Fiction for readers who want both a compelling story and something to think about afterward.
Common Ground
Common Ground
Stories of Knowledge and Belonging
What do we owe the knowledge that shaped us? And what happens when sharing it means risking its destruction?
In six interlocking stories spanning four decades and three continents, Common Ground follows masters of rare disciplines — an art conservator who sees hidden layers in colonial paintings, a cartographer learning to map what instruments cannot measure, a chef carrying three traditions of fire in his scarred hands — as they confront the impossible ethics of knowledge that survives only by staying hidden.
A documentary filmmaker deletes eleven minutes of sacred footage while a tribal council watches. A meteorologist discovers the atmosphere preserves chemical signatures of mass graves.
Moving from a Danish smokehouse to Hong Kong street kitchens, from Bogotá's violence to Alaska's traditional healing rooms, from the stone gardens of Kyoto to the salmon rivers of the Pacific Northwest.
Paperback
English: https://mybook.to/CommonGround
Echoes of connection
Echoes of connection
A Century of Information and Communication Technologies
In 1878, a domestic worker in New York touched a telephone for the first time and felt the world fold. In 2025, her great-great-granddaughter decided to turn off her smartphone and walk home the long way.
Between those two moments: six generations of three families navigating every major technological revolution of the last 150 years. The Johnsons in the United States, shaped by each new wave of communication technology from the switchboard to social media. The Garcías in Colombia, where a single radio broadcast during La Violencia saves one family and condemns another. The Diops in Senegal, where a colonial telegraph office becomes the unlikely seedbed of an independence movement — and where, decades later, a content moderator in Dakar decides what Americans are allowed to see.
A novel that tracks not just how technology changes, but how it changes us: who gets to speak, who gets heard, and what happens when the tools we built to connect us become the tools that sort us.
English & Spanish
Paperback - Kindle - Audiobook
Title in Spanish: Ecos de Conexión
English: https://mybook.to/EchoesOfConnection
Spanish: https://mybook.to/EcosConexion
Voices in Motion
Voices in Motion
Stories of Migration
Luis cleans office buildings in downtown Seattle from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. He knows the contents of every executive’s trash can and the names of no one in the building. José, a gay Colombian engineer, writes code in Silicon Valley by day and erases himself by night. Gabriela, raised in the United States since age three, carries a DACA card that makes her legal enough to work but not enough to breathe. Javier dies in ICE detention and the paperwork lists the cause as “complications.”
Fifteen characters. Fifteen ways of being invisible in plain sight.
Drawn from a decade of interviews with actual migrants, Voices in Motion brings the immigration experience to life not through statistics or policy arguments but through the people who live it: the night janitor who finds community through organizing, the trafficking survivor rebuilding trust one conversation at a time, the professional who discovers that success in America doesn’t cure the ache of displacement.
English & Spanish · Kindle · Paperback
Title in Spanish: Voces en Movimiento
ENG → https://mybook.to/VoicesInMotion
SPA → https://mybook.to/VocesEnMovimiento
Political Satire
Political Satire
A MAGA Christmas Carol
A MAGA Christmas Carol
What do you tell a five-year-old who wakes up to an empty Christmas tree? Blame the immigrants, obviously.
Little Charlie Peterson just wanted a LEGO Millennium Falcon. Instead, he got a front-row seat to his family's holiday celebration of tariffs, boat sinkings, and the glorious renaming of the Washington Monument. As relatives arrive bearing casseroles and conspiracy theories, Charlie watches the adults in his life deliver tearful testimonials to their favorite president and explain why the Supreme Court ruling that presidents can't be prosecuted is actually good news for everyone.
He can't figure out why gas costs seven dollars when his dad's shirt says "Mean Tweets, Low Prices." He doesn't understand why his favorite teacher isn't at school anymore. But he understands, with the brutal clarity only a child possesses, that the grown-ups are acting very, very strange.
A savage, heartfelt satire in the tradition of holiday fables from Dickens to Dr. Seuss. Sometimes the emperor has no clothes. Sometimes the Christmas tree has no presents. And sometimes the most dangerous question is the one a kindergartner asks at dinner: But why?
English · Paperback https://mybook.to/MAGAchristmas
© Ricardo Gómez · ricardogomez.net [Books] [About] [Amazon Author Page] [Substack: substack.com/@storiesacrossborders100]
"Stories that cross borders, centuries, and ways of knowing."
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