Seville, present day. A gray archival box. A manuscript no one was expecting to find.

When Roberto Alvarado, a historian of colonial Latin America, is summoned to the Archivo de Indias, he finds what appears to be an unpublished manuscript in the hand of Bartolomé de las Casas ? the sixteenth-century Dominican friar who witnessed the Spanish conquest of the Americas and spent fifty years bearing witness to its destruction. The manuscript is structured as a series of probanzas, legal testimonies: Las Casas accounting, in precise and merciless prose, for what he saw and failed to stop.

But Las Casas did not write alone. Between his probanzas, other voices surface: Xara, a woman from Hispaniola moving through a household that does not see her. Caimán, running from the massacre at Caonao. Rodrigo Cuneo, a translator who serves two masters and belongs to neither. Aj Xpiyakok, a Maya daykeeper recording what must survive. Tezozomoc, a Nahua scribe burning his own writing to protect it. Citlali Tozani, doing the work that history will not record.

As Roberto translates the manuscript across a year in Seville, a discovery in a different gray box changes everything he thought he was studying. The history he has spent twenty years holding at the appropriate professional distance begins to move.

The Book of Laments is a novel about testimony and its limits ? about who gets to speak for whom, what the archive preserves and what it erases, and what a person does when they discover they are living inside the very history they have spent their life studying. It is, above all, a novel about the people the record cannot hold.

For readers of Hilary Mantel, Yaa Gyasi, and Eduardo Galeano: a masterwork of colonial reckoning.