Machado Libros 2012

Coinciding with the arrival of a freak circus, a young man with an angelic voice, now a successful gospel singer, returns to his hometown, Enigma, where a black man is about to be lynched for killing and raping the singer’s former girlfriend.

The townspeople idolize him in an absurd way and attribute healing powers to him that he does not possess. Tormented by the dramatization of his own farce, he does not want the truth to come to light, fearing that the magnitude of the disappointment could be disastrous.

As Kiko Amat states in the foreword, “Enigma is a town full of backwardness, stupidity, violence, racism, and inevitably, religious fanaticism, specifically extreme Southern Christianity. Crazy yokels and believers: an eternal recipe for catastrophe.”