Hugo Gonçalves - Deus Pátria Família

Lisbon, 1940

A woman is found dead in the sanctuary of Cabo Espichel, wrapped in a white cloak, with a rosary between her fingers. Pilgrims mistake her for an apparition of Our Lady. The detectives in charge of the case don't panic, but they also don't imagine that this is only the first murder.

These are strange times: German tanks advance across Europe and the Nazi flag is raised on the Eiffel Tower. Thousands of foreigners and Jewish refugees arrive in Lisbon, choosing the Portuguese capital as temporary shelter or a gateway to a life without fear.

Crimes with religious undertones follow one another: every month, another woman is found dead. The Criminal Investigation Police entrusts the case to Luís Paixão Leal, a former boxer with a prodigious memory, a glass eye, and a mysterious past in New York. The detective, who sees justice as a life's mission, strives to discover the culprit.

Until one Sunday morning, everything changes: a violent coup removes Salazar from power and shakes the country's political landscape. Portugal abandons its neutrality in the war and aligns itself with the Axis powers. In the streets of the capital, the siege of Jewish refugees begins, and the dark memories of the Inquisition's persecutions echo.

With this political upheaval, Paixão Leal finds himself at the center of a high-level conspiracy. The detective, who lives with a German Jewish woman and her two children, feels the threat knocking at his door. In a world on the brink of collapse, you will pay a price if you insist on uncovering the truth.

From the roaring twenties in the United States to the turbulent 1940s in Portugal, we are presented with an alternative version of our past, with echoes in the present, because a single upheaval is enough to change the course of a country and haunt thousands of lives. Interweaving a police mystery with a family saga, God, Fatherland, Family is a captivating novel by the PEN Club Prize finalist author and Fernando Namora.