Book excerpt: The gentle-hearted Flavio Montoya returns, now as the aged scion of his family, still tending his sister Ramona’s fields and wondering how all of his family could have died before him. When the mountains surrounding Guadalupe erupt in flames, the history of the village seems to be set loose in the smoke. The dead arrive and the silent speak. When Flavio is accused of starting the fire that quickly threatens to consume the village, the disaster becomes one more mystery that he must fold into his own memory, though he cannot quite understand any of it. A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García is a beautiful, funny, even epic tale of how all history is finally personal.