Padura's Heretics spans and defies literary categories . . .
ingenious. --Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and
crime from a renowned Cuban author, Heretics is Leonardo Padura's
greatest detective work yet.
In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana's port with
hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From
the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers,
including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco
of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope
will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later
the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the
horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom,
disappear.
Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house
in London, prompting Daniel's son to travel to Cuba to track down the
story of his family's lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck
private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of
deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana.
In Heretics, Leonardo Padura takes us from the tenements and beaches
of Cuba to Rembrandt's gloomy studio in seventeenth-century Amsterdam,
telling the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their
faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and
the demands of their times. A grand detective story and a moving
historical drama, Padura's novel is as compelling, mysterious, and
enduring as the painting at its center.
