Adolfo Garcia Ortega

Hurbinek was born and died in Auschwitz. "Nothing remains of him; he bears witness through these words of mine," wrote Primo Levi in The Truce. Deeply moved by the unknown story of that three-year-old boy, Adolfo Garcia Ortega rescues his memory from oblivion by inventing his life-the possible lives he might have lived had he not perished, a victim to mankind's most ignominious hour. Thus, by creating for him a "life after death," the author not only pays homage to the dead but strives to redeem man's noblest side through the power of love and compassion, which no amount of torment or suffering can ever extinguish.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, a ship heads for Punta Arenas at Chile's southern tip. On board is Oliver Griffin, who is fascinated by the island and spends his life drawing intricate maps of it. He is on an unusual quest, inspired by a photograph of his grandparents embracing a strange automaton that now lives in the Punta Arenas museum. This fearsome metal warrior is a sixteenth-century robot from a proposed mechanical army, commissioned to guard the straight against the English. It was discovered on the island by a grieving woman scouring the archipelago for the bodies of her shipwrecked husband and son, and is now the curious axis around which countless stories spin, surrounded by the terrible yet mesmerizing sea...