Granada, 1491. A library is harder to move than an army.

For forty years, Yusuf ibn Khalil al-Garnati has gathered the manuscripts of Al-Andalus into a single library inside the Albaicín. Medical treatises copied in Cordoba, astronomy from Samarkand, poetry from Seville, philosophical commentary from Damascus. As the army of Ferdinand and Isabella tightens its siege, he must decide what to hide, what to send south, and what to commit to memory before the walls close.

His grandson Hassan wants to fight. His daughter Maryam, married to a Castilian merchant from Seville, wants to negotiate. And Fray Bernardo de Huesca — a Castilian friar who studied at Yusuf's side as a young man — has returned with the army, carrying a letter of protection. The offer is clear: surrender the library intact and the books will be kept safe. Cisneros is not yet in Granada. In eight years, he will be, and the Arabic manuscripts will burn in the plaza.

The Last Sermon closes The Century of Silence, the trilogy that began with The Physician's Proof and The Mapmaker's Confession. It is the destination the series has been moving toward from its first page: a study of what can be saved, at what cost, when the saving is done by people who cannot yet see the full shape of what is coming.

For listeners drawn to Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, and novels where the ending has been known for five centuries and still costs something to hear.