About This Book
In a small Mexican town at the turn of the twentieth century, a baby is found abandoned beneath a bridge, his body covered in a living blanket of bees. The Morales family takes him in, naming him Simonopio, and what follows is a story about how one inexplicable child can alter the fate of everyone around him — as revolution brews, land is seized, and a family fights to hold onto what it loves. Sofía Segovia weaves together the intimate and the epic: a household's daily rituals set against the upheaval of an entire nation, with Simonopio at the center as both witness and harbinger.
What distinguishes this novel is how Segovia handles time and mystery. She never reduces Simonopio to a symbol or a trick — his gift is rendered with restraint, embedded in the natural rhythms of bees, seasons, and soil. The prose (elegantly translated by Simon Bruni) moves between generations with the ease of oral storytelling, drawing readers into a world where the magical and the historical feel inseparable. It's the kind of novel where the atmosphere does as much work as the plot, and where the ending lands with a weight that has been quietly building from the first page.