“For a generation, Linda Chavez has provided a clear, courageous voice in our national discourse. Now, as it turns out, she's also a novelist of grace and skill. Inspired by 500 years of her family's remarkable history, she tells a story of hidden identity but unfaltering faith. The Silver Candlesticks is compelling, readable, and particularly pertinent at this moment of surging, worldwide antisemitism.”

– Michael Medved, syndicated radio host, author of The American Miracle

“One of the most satisfying aspects of Finding Your Roots is unveiling hidden mysteries on a guest’s family tree, and political commentator Linda Chavez’s ancestral revelations were among the most astonishing that we have ever uncovered. Chavez has transformed the fascinating raw material of her long-hidden family saga into a brilliant novel about the Spanish Inquisition. Linda’s family migrated to the American Southwest from Spain more than 400 years ago seeking adventure but also escaping persecution for their religious beliefs: secretly, they were Jews! Chavez has masterfully woven a story of love, intrigue, and the meaning of faith into a page-turning novel that takes the reader into the home of one of Seville’s prosperous merchant families in the late sixteenth century. The novel’s heroine, Guiomar Péres, must fight her own inner demons while staving off the city’s new Grand Inquisitor, obsessed with entrapping her into the cells of his medieval torture chambers. The Silver Candlesticks’ characters are complex, the plot exciting, and the prose evocative of an exotic place and time. Extremely well-researched, Chavez has marvelously transformed the historical facts of her own ancestry into fully-imagined, luminous fiction. It is a stunning accomplishment.”

– Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“This immersive, haunting, richly detailed historical novel of the Spanish Inquisition tells the story of Guiomar, a young woman whose future is forever changed when she learns her family’s dangerous secret: they are Conversos, or secret Jews, their heritage embodied in a pair of silver candlesticks. Set in 16th Century Spain, and told in Linda Chavez’s steady, assured prose, The Silver Candlesticks is a haunting—and unforgettable—story of the secret Jews of Spain, as well as a gripping tale of love and friendship, and of how faith endures in the face of persecution.”

– Susan Coll, Author of Bookish People and Real Life and Other Fictions