Prayer to Proserpine

Ancient Rome, mid I century BC.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, for educational purposes, sends his seventeen-year-old son to search for the manticore, a harbinger of cataclysms, which supposedly emerged from the bowels of the earth in the province of Proconsular Africa. But in the African desert, Marcus Tullius Junior and his companions—a warrior worshiping the goddess of Earth, a young hapless shepherd, Punic hunters, and a slave, a propagandist of revolutionary ideas—discover that far more terrifying beings have emerged from the depths and they have very ambitious plans...
Albert Sanchez Pinol is an anthropologist and one of the largest and most original stars of Catalan literature; he is as original and popular as Jaume Cabré.

He is the creator of amazing worlds where the real and the fantastic intermingle, and man time and again encounters the Others in the best traditions of Lovecraft and Stevenson.

In Sanchez Pinol's new novel "Prayer to Proserpine," people find themselves facing the most important choice—change or die.

And what is enlightened Rome willing to do—what are all of us willing to do, in any country and in all ages—to confront the threat of total destruction of humanity?