(In 1290, King Edward I expelled the Jews from England. In 1656, a small community of Spanish Catholic merchants lived in London bound by a sacred secret. They were all Portuguese Jews. This is the story of one of them, Domingo de Lacerda, who learns early on that survival in seventeenth-century Europe requires both deceit and conformity. But then he meets Lucy, who has secrets of her own and who challenges Domingo to question everything he has been taught to value. The political and spiritual conflicts that characterized the Iberian Inquisition, the English Civil War, and the English Interregnum provide a backdrop against which Domingo must choose between his obligation to the Jewish community that protects him and the Catholic woman who loves him. Patricia O'Sullivan is the author of Hope of Israel and the forthcoming, Legend of the Dead. She lives in Mississippi with her family.

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