Every Hand But His Own

About this book

Lisbon, the first of November, 1755. Anselmo Trigueiro is nineteen, a notary's copyist with a rare and useless gift: he can reproduce any handwriting he has seen twice. Then the earth moves, the sea comes up the river, and the fire eats the city's memory — every deed, will, register and title in the lower town turns to ash. In the ruin that follows, a young man who can put words into a dead man's hand is no longer useless. He is necessary. What begins as mercy — restoring a widow's stolen claim, giving the dispossessed back their names — becomes a trade, and then a leash. When an attempt is made on the King's life three years later, the Crown's coldest magistrate needs confessions that do not exist, in hands that will be recognized. Anselmo does not want to be brave. He wants his sister fed and his own skin whole. He signs a coachman's name to a lie, and a man he never met is broken on the wheel at Belém. Twenty-two years later the King is dead, the great minister has fallen, the prison gates at Junqueira stand open, and the son of that coachman has walked out into the daylight with nothing left to do but find the hand that killed his father. He does not know Anselmo's face. He knows only his letters. And the new government, hungry to condemn the old one, wants one more convenient document from Lisbon's most respected scrivener. Told in two braided timelines — the ruined city and the reckoning that comes for it — Every Hand But His Own is the story of a coward with a talent, the small yeses that build a life, and the one page a man can only write in his own hand.