El amante silencioso (The silent lover)
In The silent lover, the bestselling author Clara Sánchez revisits the theme that has driven her writing throughout her career – that we are not what we seem. Psychological manipulation takes centre stage as Sanchez explores the emotional power that we hold over each other, through work, through love, through family. Our loved ones are those trees that stop us from seeing the forest, and cloud our reason to the most unthinkable extremes. This emotional power finds its fullest expression in groups: we need desperately to be loved, accepted, valued, to belong to something and become one of the tribe. And it is this need on which cults thrive.
The city of Mombasa and the diplomatic world of Nairobi, where the author has travelled extensively, are the inspiration for a tale of intrigue and discovery, in blazing sun and suffocating heat, where luxury and poverty, dreams and disillusionment live side by side. In a place like this, anyone can become a villain or a hero, an angel or a demon. Isabel, a young woman from Madrid, arrives in Kenya with the task of seducing Ezequiel, to rescue him from a shadowy sect known as the Humanitarian Order which he had joined years before, breaking off all ties with his family. But, as ever when we enter Sánchez’s world, nothing is what it appears to be, and Isabel is soon tangled in a web of truth and lies, where it becomes impossible to tell good from bad. Will Isabel manage to rescue Ezequiel, and save herself?