Secrets of love and blood

Secrets of Love and Blood is the author's return to the era when Diogo Alves, the infamous Galician who killed at the Águas Livres Aqueduct, was the main protagonist of crime in Lisbon. In 1997, he wrote the screenplay for the film The Death of Diogo Alves, which won the RTP Grand Fiction Prize. Now, he brings the celebrated criminal back as a pretext to reconstruct the popular Lisbon of the 1830s, a time when the city shed its old pre-liberal customs and took its first steps into emergent Liberalism. Marked by violence and poverty, this novel is a story of tenderness and passion, in a harsh time, where the strength of Love and Letters prevails over the voracity of war and crime, in a country with ninety percent of its population illiterate. It is a novel with passionate stories of love and death, of fascination with the discovery of words written in Portuguese. Manuel Alcanhões, the narrator, eternally in love with Isabel, a tavern keeper in Alfama, witnesses the arrival of Modern Portugal, learning from the lessons of a Miguelist priest.