Seville, present day. A gray archival box. A manuscript no one was expecting to find.

When Roberto Alvarado, a Mexican-American historian of colonial Latin America, is summoned to the Archivo de Indias, he finds what appears to be an unpublished manuscript in the hand of Bartolomé de las Casas—the sixteenth-century Dominican friar who witnessed the Spanish conquest of the Americas and spent fifty years bearing witness to its destruction. Structured as a series of probanzas, the legal testimonies of his era, the manuscript is Las Casas in his final years: accounting, in precise and merciless prose, for what he saw and failed to stop.

But Las Casas did not write alone. Between his testimonies, other voices surface—the voices the archive has no room for:

• Xara, a woman from Hispaniola moving through a household that does not see her
• Caimán, running from the massacre at Caonao with no destination except away
• Rodrigo Cuneo, a translator who serves two masters and belongs to neither
• Aj Xpiyakok, a Maya daykeeper recording what must be preserved
• Tezozomoc, a Nahua scribe burning his own writing to protect it
• Citlali Tozani, doing the work that history will not record

As Roberto translates the manuscript across a year in Seville, a discovery in a different gray box changes everything he thought he was studying. The history he has spent two decades holding at the appropriate professional distance — through the archival cotton gloves he put on himself — begins, at last, to move.

The Book of Laments is a novel about testimony and its limits: about who speaks for whom, what the archive preserves and what it erases, and what it costs a person to discover they have been living inside the very history they have spent their life studying. It is, above all, a novel about the people the record cannot hold.