Book Club - The City of Palaces by Michael Nava

Next date: Tuesday, September 16, 2025 | 06:00 PM to 07:00 PM

Tuesday, September 16 at 6:00 PM

Join us for a discussion of The City of Palaces: a novel by Michael Nava, a sweeping saga of pre-revolutionary Mexico

ABOUT THE BOOK

The City of Palaces: A Novel by Michael Nava

In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a tiny elite that adopted European culture, grows rich from foreign investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Díaz, the ruthless and inscrutable president of the Republic. Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city’s destitute. This unlikely pair—he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian—will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, José, readers follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath.

The City of Palaces is a sweeping novel of interwoven Miguel and Alicia; José, a boy as beautiful and lonely as a child in a fairy tale; the idealistic Francisco Madero, who overthrows Díaz but is nevertheless destroyed by the tyrant’s political system; and Miguel’s cousin Luis, shunned as a “sodomite.” A glittering mosaic of the colonial past and the wealth of the modern age, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Nava is an acclaimed author and attorney known for his influential Henry Rios Mystery Series featuring a gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer. Born in Stockton, California in 1954, Nava is a third-generation Californian of Mexican descent. He is a graduate of Colorado College and Stanford Law School, and has had a distinguished legal career including working on the staff of the California Supreme Court. The City of Palaces, published in 2014, marks a departure from his mystery novels and is the first book in a planned series of historical novels called The Children of Eve, set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution. Nava's writing, which has garnered numerous awards including six Lambda Literary Awards for the Rios novels and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in LGBTQ literature, is celebrated for its exploration of Latino and LGBTQ experiences and its commitment to social justice.

When

Location

2nd Floor, Community Room

Library | Parks & Recreation Center, 901 Civic Campus Way, 94080, View Map