The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was no run-of-the-mill misfortune-it was a watershed moment that shook the pillars of an inveterate social order and sent reverberations throughout the Western world. Earth, water, wind, and fire all conspired to produce a hellish catastrophe that lasted for a full five days and left Lisbon thoroughly annihilated. Nicholas Shrady's unique account of this first modern disaster and its aftereffects successfully articulates the outcome of the earthquake-the eighteenth-century equivalent of a mass media frenzy giving rise to a host of other fascinating developments, such as disaster preparedness, landmark social reform, urban planning, and the birth of seismology.

Lucia Vidal, Spanish exile, legendary radio personality, and improbable Park Avenue matron, has died mysteriously while on a return trip to her homeland after nearly forty years of painful, if gilded banishment in New York. So begins this multi-generational story of love and family, war and exile, long-guarded secrets and haunting twists of fate. Beginning in the 1970s and flashing back to the 1930s and the years, at once vibrant and tragic, of the Spanish Civil War, this fast-paced novel takes readers on an adventure between New York, Barcelona, Paris, and Tortosa. Only as this deeply moving story comes to an end do a cast of finely-wrought characters, including Lucia's husband Adam Fates, her son Paco, a long-lost lover, and a collection of her estranged Spanish kin, realize that little in Lucia Vidal's life, or their own, was as it had seemed.