One night in 1793, a man risked everything for an idea.
Antonio Nariño had wealth, position, and a family he adored. But the night his hands set the forbidden Declaration of the Rights of Man into type, he lit a fire that would consume his fortune, his freedom, and thirty years of his life, and help bring a nation into being.
From the candlelit printing presses of colonial Santafé de Bogotá to a prison cell battered by the sea winds of Cádiz, from the presidency of Cundinamarca to a defiant cry on a balcony in Pasto ("Here you have General Nariño!"), this sweeping novel follows Colombia's independence precursor all the way to his last breath in Villa de Leyva.
But this is not his story alone. It is told through five voices: Magdalena, the wife who kept the resistance alive while he languished in prison; Carlos, the mestizo musician who wove a spy network out of melody; Pedro, the freed slave who became a soldier of liberty; Wayra, the Muisca woman who asks what independence really means for those history forgets; and Nariño himself, who pays for seventeen articles of liberty with everything he has.
Revised and expanded in this new edition, co-authored by Ricardo Gómez and Mauricio Beltrán, Echoes of Liberty recovers the invisible architects of a continent's freedom and asks the question every revolution leaves behind: was it worth it?
For readers of All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale.