The Secret Music at Tordesillas

Name: The Secret Music at Tordesillas
ISBN: 9780999491539

A Novel

Marjorie Sandor

It is April, 1555, and Juana I of Castile, the Spanish queen known as "la loca," has died after forty-seven years in forced seclusion at Tordesillas. Her last musician, Juan de Granada, refuses to depart with the other servants, forcing two functionaries of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to interrogate him in the now-empty palace. But is it really empty? Or is there, as Holy Office suspects, a heretic hidden on the premises, a converso secretly practicing the forbidden rites of Judaism? Only Juan knows the answer, and his subversive tale is at once a ballad of lost love and a last gambit to save a life—and a rich cultural and spiritual tradition on the verge of erasure.

"Radiant, passionate, deeply intelligent and intensely moving, this brilliant novel brings alive a place and time surprisingly resonant with our own. Love and music burn like a laser through these glorious pages." —Andrea Barrett

"In The Secret Music of Tordesillas, the fabulously gifted Marjorie Sandor tells the absorbing story of a Jewish musician and his queen, both living precarious lives in the tumultuous world of the Spanish Inquisition. Sandor's lustrous prose resonates like the music she so eloquently describes and her characters are exquisitely complicated. Reading these gorgeous pages, I felt that I too had taken up residence in some castle full of dark corners." —Margot Livesey

"An historical novel of striking imagination and lyricism, this sly tale of sixteenth-century Spain, with its secrets and masks involving the interrelationships of Catholics, Muslims and Jews, has an uncanny bearing on our own country's diversity tensions. It is a pleasure to have another of Marjorie Sandor's delicious fictions: she is writing at the top of her form." —Phillip Lopate

"I found Marjorie Sandor's The Secret Music at Tordesillas irresistible, as appealing for its grand romantic adventure as it is for its clear-eyed exploration of culture, tradition, and identity. Its narrative-replete with hidden Jews, palace intrigue, a captive queen, a hopeless love-is rendered in a prose as intoxicating as the ancient music that informs it. This is history in the form of a haunting song." —Steve Stern

About the Author

Marjorie Sandor received the 2004 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, administered by the Jewish Book Council, for her story collection Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime. The ten linked stories center on a Jewish immigrant family whose well-meant secrets, kept to shield the next generation from painful history, only cause further trouble. Sandor has said the family is largely invented, though some incidents draw on anecdotes and legends passed down by her parents and grandparents. The book is typical of her work in its attention to inherited memory, silence, and the weight of the past on later generations.

Her debut novel, The Secret Music at Tordesillas (2020), grew from Sandor’s wish, as a Jewish writer, to imagine a musically gifted Jewish child at the moment of the Expulsion from Spain. It follows a young oud player of Jewish descent from Granada who becomes a court musician to Juana I of Castile (“Juana la Loca”) during the early years of the Spanish Inquisition. The novel won the inaugural Tuscarora Award for Historical Fiction. Sandor describes it as a story about holding on to personal and artistic liberty in a time of ethnic cleansing and national paranoia. Her other books include the essay collection The Night Gardener and the memoir The Late Interiors, and she edited the anthology The Uncanny Reader. She is professor emerita of creative writing and English at Oregon State University and lives in Corvallis, Oregon.