Cathedral of the Sea

Ildefonso Falcones is a Spanish lawyer and the internationally bestselling and award-winning author of Cathedral of the Sea and The Hand of Fatima. With over seven million copies sold, his work has been translated into more than 40 languages worldwide. He lives in Barcelona with his wife and four children.

An unforgettable fresco of a golden age in fourteenth-century Barcelona, Cathedral of the Sea is a thrilling historical novel of friendship and revenge, plague and hope, love and war.
 
Arnau Estanyol arrives in Barcelona to find a city dominated by the construction of the city s great pride the cathedral of Santa Maria del Mar and by its shame, the deadly Inquisition. As a young man, Arnau joins the powerful guild of stoneworkers and helps to build the church with his own hands, while his best friend and adopted brother Joanet studies to become a priest.
 
With time, Arnau prospers and falls secretly in love with a forbidden woman. But when he is betrayed and hauled before the Inquisitor, he finds himself face-to-face with Joanet. Will he lose his life just as his beloved Cathedral of the Sea is finally completed, or will his brother save him?

MORE THAN TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE!

A masterful epic of love, war, treason, plague, famine, witchcraft, anti-Semitism and the Inquisition 14th-century Spain, the medieval city of Barcelona is enjoying a golden age of prosperity. Its humblest inhabitants are building, stone by stone, a magnificent church to overlook their harbour. This is the Cathedral of the Sea: a church to be built for the people by the people. In its shadow, Arnau, a young serf on the run from his feudal lord, struggles to earn his freedom. After famine, plague and thwarted love, Arnau's fortunes begin to turn when King Pedro makes him a baron as a reward for his courage in battle. But he is also forced to marry Eleonor, a ward of the King whom he does not love. His newfound status excites jealousy from his friends who plot his downfall with devastating consequences. Arnau's journey from slave to nobleman is the story of a struggle between good and evil that will turn Church against State and brother against brother ...