Ni siquiera los muertos

The conquest of Mexico is over, and Juan de Toñanes is one of many inglorious soldiers who roam like beggars on the land they helped to subdue. When he receives one last mission, to hunt down a renegade Indian who is nicknamed the Father and who preaches a dangerous heresy, he realizes that it may be his last chance to carve out the future he always dreamed of. But as he ventures into the unexplored lands of the north following the Father's trail, he will discover the footprints of a man who appears not only a man, but a prophet destined to transform his time and even the times to come. Not even the dead is the story of a persecution that transcends territories and centuries; a path that heads north, always north, that is, always towards the future, on a hallucinatory journey from New Spain in the sixteenth century to the Trump wall of today. Former conquerors on horseback and migrants who ride the roofs of the Beast, revolted Indians and peasants who wait patiently for a better world, Mexican revolutionaries who take their rifles and women murdered in the desert of Ciudad Juárez pass through it. They all share the same landscape and the same hope: the arrival of the Father who will bring justice to the oppressed. In his new novel, Gómez Bárcena takes the Mexican reality as a pretext to peer into world history, in a critical reading that questions faith in progress and highlights the unfulfilled promises of capitalism. With echoes of authors as disparate as Joseph Conrad, Alejo Carpentier or David Mitchell, Not Even the Dead is the journey of two homeless men who advance because they can no longer go back, and it is also a vindication of justice for the losers of History.