The Mercearia Mother

In Lurdes’s Mercearia one October morning, an old woman turns an apple in her hand and asks a question that is sixty years old: her mother always spoke of a brother — a name no one in the family has ever known.

The Archivist of Silves is a cozy historical fiction audiobook series set in the municipal archive of a small town in the Portuguese Algarve. Henrike Steinhoff came for the records and stayed for the town — and she has a memory for things that don’t quite add up: a gap in a file, a name that changes spelling, a story everyone tells the same way.