As Green As Paradise

The avocado carver was once a conquistador.  This time, though, he aims to arrive in peace, as a governor, leading his relatives across the sea to a new world where they will found a settlement in a green valley.  Yet his hopes for harmony with the indigenous people do not develop as planned.  And distant dark forces conspire against him, certain that his relatives share a secret and forbidden heritage.  His memories pursue him too, images of a childhood upon a faraway island, and of a dusty peninsula that he will never see again.

As Green as Paradise is a lyrical weave of the governor's story, flowing with fables of beauty and solitude. It is a tale of loves lost and dreams unfulfilled, of characters condemned to forge ahead in a world at once old and new: scribes and inquisitioners, soldiers and scholars, storytellers and warriors, a unicorn hunter and a pirate and a wanderer, a poet and a musician too. And amid story upon story, the governor carves dim codes into the pits of discarded avocados and remembers it all.