The Trial of Anna Thalberg - by Eduardo Sangarcía (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Anna Thalberg is shunned by her village for her red hair and provocative beauty, so the neighbors do not intervene when she is accused of witchcraft and imprisoned. Only her husband Klaus and Father Friedrich, a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, are determined to prove her innocence. Can they convince the Church inquisitors to release Anna before she is burned at the stake?"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2020 Mauricio Achar Award

Does evil lurk in the shadows of the forest or within the human heart? Eduardo Sangarcía's tale of one woman's trial opens the door to deeper horrors.

Anna Thalberg is a villager shunned for her red hair and provocative beauty, so when she is dragged from her home and accused of witchcraft, her neighbors do not intervene. Only Klaus, her husband, and Father Friedrich, a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, set out to Würzburg to prove her innocence. There, locked in a prison tower, Anna faces isolation and torture while anxiety builds over strange happenings within the city walls. Can the two men convince the Church inquisitors to release Anna, or will she burn at the stake?

The Trial of Anna Thalberg is a tale of religious persecution, superstition, and suffering during the Protestant Reformation. While mapping the medieval fear of occultism and demons, it delves into enduring human concerns: the oppression of women, the inhumanity of institutions, and the question of God's existence. Frantic in pace and experimental in form, this is an unforgettable debut from Mexican author Eduardo Sangarcía.

Review Quotes

"A novel that can be read with great emotion and great suspense, written with impressive formal virtuosity." -- Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season

"A marvelous work that challenges the reader on multiple levels and communicates directly with our present." -- Cristina Rivera Garza, author of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice

"In Elizabeth Bryer's translation of Sangarcía's original Spanish, Anna's ordeal is narrated like a fever dream, pitting the hideous realities of her incarceration against the paranoid fantasies of her accusers." -- Alida Becker, The New York Times

"Misogyny and religious conviction are vicious bedfellows in Eduardo Sangarcía's horrifying, humbling . . . inferno of a historical novel, burning through the lies told about defiant women across the centuries." -- Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

"Chilling, mesmerising and immersive. . . . The narrative has a sinuous quality to it, threading its way through consciousnesses, across spaces and into memories, weaving its portrait of the tangled web in which its characters are caught. It does so with admirable vividness and economy, made possible by Bryer's deft rendering of the original Spanish into a hypnotic and compelling early modern-inflected English." -- NSW Translation Prize, Judges' Citation

"Sangarcía pulls together an astute account of Anna's trial and sheds light on how witch hunts were rooted in the hatred and suspicion of women ('little girls like you only bring misfortunes and calamities'). The prose, lyrical and scarcely punctuated, matches the plot's frenzied pace. Fans of Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season will love this." -- Publisher's Weekly

"As bleak as it is beautiful. Sangarcía has given us a story that is breathlessly told, formally innovative, and lays bare our all-too-common tendency towards cruelty, while never foregoing his own humanity. Welcome to a new, luminous voice in literature." -- Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of The Bullet Swallower

"Eduardo Sangarcía's writing blends a sophisticated feeling for history with penetrating intuition about human consciousness to conjure elegant nightmares. One of the most attractive voices of contemporary Mexican literature." -- Julián Herbert, author of Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino

"A merciless chronicle of witchcraft trials that is more than a mere testimony of the times: it is also a trial of the violence that has historically been exercised against women. With a coven of torrential voices, Eduardo Sangarcía lays bare the unreasonableness of a past that also speaks of our present." -- Juan Gómez Bárcena, author of Not Even the Dead

"With an audacious style, a singular use of juxtaposed dialogue, and a structure reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Eduardo Sangarcía achieves a narrative feat that keeps us hooked until the very last line. Although we know what will happen, since he has advertised it from the beginning, we believe in the unexpected, hoping for the miracle to occur. In the end, he both pleases and surprises us, just the way great literature ought to do." -- Yoss, author of A Planet for Rent

About the Author

Eduardo Sangarcía is the author of El desconocido del Meno (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro), a collection of short stories that was awarded the prestigious Premio Nacional de Cuento Joven Comala 2017. He is currently studying for a Ph.D. in Humanities with a specialization on Latin American literature of the Holocaust. He lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.