From the author of The Empress comes a sweeping historical novel and Cold War thriller that reimagines the fate of Frida Kahlo’s mysterious missing masterpiece as a Soviet secretary risks her life to save it.

In postwar Moscow, Soviet secretary Olga Simonova is instructed to destroy a painting from Mexico by Diego Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Her boss condemns the surrealist depiction of a woman’s suffering as bourgeois and anti-Soviet. Once a painter herself, Olga has experienced devastating losses and oppression by the Soviet regime, and she identifies with the anguish in Kahlo’s self-portrait. She secretly resolves to rescue the painting, even though her decision could cost her dearly.

Profound betrayal motivates Frida to paint The Wounded Table, and when she decides to donate it to the USSR, her husband is happy to see it go. While experiencing chronic pain and a troubled marriage, Frida struggles to express herself as an artist in her own right.

Unfolding in dual timelines, The Hidden Portrait spans 1930s Mexico to Cold War Berlin as Laura Martínez-Belli reimagines the fate of Kahlo’s lost masterpiece and explores the risks each woman dares to take to preserve beauty and truth in a hostile world.

Laura Martínez-Belli was born in Barcelona in 1975. She is the daughter of a Spanish father and a Nicaraguan mother. She has lived in Panama, Spain, and Mexico, so she feels like a citizen of the world. In 1995, she arrived in Mexico, where she resided for twenty years, making her a Spanish writer with a very Mexican voice. Some of her novels are set in the foundational moments of Mexican history: Por si no te vuelvo a ver is set during the Mexican Revolution, The Empress is a contemporary perspective on the life of Empress Carlota of Belgium, and La otra Isabel, which was a finalist for the prestigious Planeta Prize for commercial fiction, tells the life of Moctezuma’s daughter. Her novel The Hidden Portrait was selected for the 2025 longlist of the Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize, which recognizes the best novel published in Spanish. For more information, visit www.martinezbelli.com.

Thomas Bunstead has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Agustín Fernández Mallo, María Gainza, and Enrique Vila-Matas, and he is twice a winner of PEN Translates awards. In 2022, his translation of The Mad People of Paris by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón won an O. Henry Prize and the McGinnis-Ritchie Award. He was short-listed for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction 2020 and National Translation Awards for Optic Nerve by María Gainza, also a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. His own writing has appeared in publications such as Brixton Review of Books, Lit Hub, and The Paris Review.