Paloma Sánchez-Garnica launches 1968 New York novel Un hombre de honor

Press tour across New York locations

Spanish author Paloma Sánchez-Garnica presented her latest novel, Un hombre de honor, published by Editorial Planeta, during a press tour in New York City. Born in Madrid in 1962, Sánchez-Garnica released the work as her tenth novel across a twenty-year writing career, following her 2024 Premio Planeta award for Victoria. The promotional tour took cultural journalists through specific urban locations featured in the narrative, moving from the eastern bank of the Central Park lake to the streets of Little Italy, the Financial District, and Strivers' Row in Harlem. Her narrative moves from post-war Berlin in her prior book to Manhattan during the political and social unrest of 1968. The book combines police investigation, journalistic inquiry, and the internal secrets of a prominent New York family.

Investigative plot and the RFK assassination

The plot originated after Sánchez-Garnica read a news report concerning repeated parole denials for Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968 in Los Angeles. That report prompted her to examine case files, where she noted ballistic disputes regarding the fatal shot fired behind Kennedy's right ear and reviewed archival materials on the CIA's MKUltra mind-control project. In the novel, young journalist Nicole Donaldson works inside a male-dominated newsroom at The New York Times on 43rd Street and witnesses the assassination inside the Ambassador Hotel kitchen. Donaldson crosses paths with Frank Bernstein, a Jewish police detective confronting departmental corruption and bribery inside a Harlem precinct.

It was a year of enormous transformations, an era in which many of the pillars on which American society had been built after the Second World War began to crack.

Depicting organized crime and waterfront routes

The novel also focuses on the operations of the Sicilian mafia, tracing heroin distribution routes linked to the Vietnam War and maritime traffic along the Hudson River. Underworld characters such as Gordo Farelli, Russell Torino, Fabrizio Donatti, and an unseen boss nicknamed God drive the crime storyline. Sánchez-Garnica stopped with journalists at Da Gennaro on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, the location where mobster Joe Gallo was shot and killed in 1972. The itinerary included the 1907 Beaux-Arts ferry terminal on the Hoboken waterfront in New Jersey, located across the river near a 24-meter sculpture by Jaume Plensa depicting a figure with a finger to its lips.

The mafia is the mafia and it always collects its debts.

Reflections on institutions and migration

Sánchez-Garnica connected the 1968 backdrop, shaped by the Vietnam War and urban protests after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to enduring questions of institutional credibility. She argued that when citizens begin to distrust state institutions, foundational elements of democratic systems experience severe strain. Walking through residential Harlem avenues bearing the names of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., the author stated that United States leaders should keep in mind that the country remains built on immigration, just as it was two centuries earlier.

I write to learn and to understand my most immediate past, to understand who we are and how we arrived here.