Knowledge and Discovery
Knowledge and Discovery
Embedded Files
Hidden manuscripts, forbidden maps, and the people who saved them
In these novels, knowledge itself is the thing at stake. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars in medieval Toledo race to preserve manuscripts before reconquest destroys them. Their descendants carry that mission into a reimagined 1492. A modern woman traces coded ledgers back to a family secret buried during the Inquisition. A cartographer's daughter inherits an atlas of futures that were never supposed to be mapped. A retired attorney opens a cedar chest containing an entire legal file from territorial Alaska, 1918. What connects them is the conviction that some truths survive only because someone decided they were worth hiding.
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.
Historical Fantasy
Title in Spanish: El Pacto Andalusí
Audiobook - Kindle - Paperback
English → https://mybook.to/AndalusianCovenant
Spanish → https://mybook.to/PactoAndalusi
The
Mahogany Chest
The
Mahogany Chest
In the summer of 2024, a retired attorney discovered a mahogany 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 Mahogany Chest is the account of how those words survived, what they contain, and why they still matter.
Audiobook - Kindle - Paperback
English →
The Cartographer's Daughter
The Cartographer's Daughter
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
The Book of Laments
The Book of Laments
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.
Title in Spanish: El Libro de los Lamentos
Paperback, ebook
→ English: https://mybook.to/BookOfLaments
→ Spanish: https://mybook.to/LibroDeLamentos
The Language Between
The Language Between
Granada, 1599.
A young Morisco translator is hired to help catalog the controversial lead tablets of Sacromonte before they are shipped to Rome. She recognizes the inscriptions. They are the work of her grandfather's secret circle — texts designed to be read in two languages at once, Arabic and Latin, by two readers whose voices produce a meaning neither contains alone.
Over weeks of careful work with a Hieronymite monk, she teaches him the method without telling him she is teaching him. Their voices align. Something appears between them that neither can explain and neither can deny.
Then the tablets are ordered to Rome. Her community turns against her. And the Church is about to examine two halves of a text in separate rooms and call the whole thing a forgery.
Based on the real plomos del Sacromonte, The Language Between is a novel about the knowledge that can only exist between people — and what happens when institutions pull those people apart.
Kindle - Paperback - English
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
Unauthorized Nature Tales
Unauthorized Nature Tales
Ever wondered what a glacier thinks about climate change? Or what dandelions really feel about your lawn care routine? In this wildly inventive illustrated collection, nature finally gets to speak for itself — and it has a lot to say. Twenty-six interconnected micro-tales, each two paragraphs long, each accompanied by a full-page illustration, give voice to the secret lives, petty grievances, and existential musings of Earth's inhabitants — from the microscopic to the cosmic, from the profound to the ridiculous.
Meet a penguin running underground dance parties after the documentary crews leave. A lichen contemplating its three-century relationship with its fungal partner. A raccoon treating locked garbage bins like engineering puzzles. A slug who sees its slime trails as performance art. An ancient uranium ore with commitment issues. And a surprisingly self-aware human, trying to make sense of its own place in the ecosystem.
The book's illustrations blend scientific accuracy with emotional resonance — detailed botanical drawings merging with whimsical character studies, each page design as distinctive as the voice it accompanies. The result transforms natural history into something both familiar and fantastical. Warning: May cause unexpected empathy for weeds and renewed respect for bacteria.
Nature writing & illustrated fiction · English · Paperback
Paperback - English → https://mybook.to/UnauthorizedNature
The Translators of Toledo Trilogy
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.
English: Kindle · Paperback → 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.
English: Kindle · Paperback → 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.
English: Kindle · Paperback → https://mybook.to/SeedsForTheFuture
The CEntury OF Silence Trilogy (forthcoming)
The CEntury OF Silence Trilogy (forthcoming)
Spain, 1415-1492. Three novels. Three communities. Three forms of knowledge that someone decided were worth destroying.
The Translators of Toledo told the story of a golden age, when Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars passed manuscripts between languages and kept the world's learning alive. The Century of Silence tells what happened next. Over the course of the fifteenth century, the legal machinery of inquisition, the culture of informers, and the slow delegitimization of interfaith scholarship dismantled everything the translators had built. By 1492, it was gone.
Each novel follows a different community under pressure during a different decade of the collapse. A Jewish physician in Seville. A converso cartographer in Majorca. A Muslim scholar in Granada. Each protects a different kind of knowledge. Each faces a version of the same impossible question: what do you preserve when preservation itself becomes evidence against you?
Available in English and Spanish.
Vol 1
The Physician's Proof
Vol 1
The Physician's Proof
Seville and Córdoba, 1415-1420.
In the aftermath of the Disputation of Tortosa, a two-year forced theological debate that broke the spine of Jewish communal life across Aragon, a Jewish physician in Seville watches his world divide. Former neighbors, colleagues, family members have converted. Some under threat, some from conviction, most from exhaustion. He has not. His medical practice depends on patients from all three faiths, and on training rooted in Arabic texts and Galenic theory transmitted through Muslim scholars. When he is called to provide expert testimony in a case involving a converso family accused of secret Jewish practice, the evidence is a jar of olive oil found in their kitchen during Lent. He knows the oil is medicinal, not ritual. But to testify means exposing the intellectual lineage of his own practice and drawing the attention of the same informers who are watching everyone else.
A novel about the weaponization of everyday life, the impossible position of those who did not convert, and the medical knowledge that could only exist because three faiths had once shared it.
Vol 2
The Mapmaker's Confession
Vol 2
The Mapmaker's Confession
Majorca and the Catalan coast, 1450-1460.
Majorca produced the greatest mapmakers in the medieval world. The Cresques family and their successors, Jewish cartographers, created the Catalan Atlas and the charts that guided Portuguese and Castilian exploration. By mid-century, most of these families had converted or fled. The knowledge survived in workshops, passed from master to apprentice, but the chain was fraying. A young converso woman inherits her father's cartographic workshop after his death. She is the only one who can read his notation system, a private cipher that encodes not just coordinates but the oral navigation traditions of Jewish and Muslim sailors. The Portuguese court wants her charts. The Inquisition wants to know why her father's maps contain Arabic place names. She must choose: simplify the charts, making them useful to empire but erasing the knowledge tradition, or preserve the full notation and risk exposing a family that never fully left its past behind.
A novel about knowledge as inheritance, the cartographic revolution as an act of erasure, and the cost of carrying what you were supposed to forget.
Vol 3
The
Last Sermon
Vol 3
The
Last Sermon
Granada, 1480-1492.
The twelve-year war for Granada is usually told as a military story. Inside the walls, a different war was happening. An elderly imam has spent forty years assembling a library of manuscripts, scientific, literary, philosophical, theological, that represents the accumulated learning of Al-Andalus. As the Castilian army closes in, he must decide what to hide, what to send away, and what to commit to memory before it is too late. His grandson wants to fight. His daughter, married to a Christian merchant, wants to negotiate. And a Castilian priest who once studied in the imam's school has returned with the conquering army, carrying a letter that offers the library protection, if the imam will surrender it intact. Everyone in this novel believes they are preserving something. Not everyone means the same thing by it.
A novel about the final hours of a civilization, the betrayal that wears the face of protection, and the impossible arithmetic of deciding what survives.
© Ricardo Gómez · ricardogomez.net [Books] [About] [Amazon Author Page] [Substack: substack.com/@storiesacrossborders100]
"Stories that cross borders, centuries, and ways of knowing."
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse