

CAGED SOUL
A Novel
"On the eve of his career-defining Paris retrospective in 1957, a Spanish-born painter discovers that the woman who broke him twenty-one years ago has returned with a memoir dedicated to him—forcing him to confront whether the art that saved his life was built on a wound he never allowed to heal."
Literary Fiction | Dual Timeline: Paris 1957 / 1936 | 97,000 words
=== ABOUT THE NOVEL ===
Paris, November 1957. Antonio Ruiz, a forty-nine-year-old Spanish painter, is preparing his career-defining retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo when he discovers that Marie-Thérèse Laurent—the great love he lost twenty-one years ago—has resurfaced in the city with a memoir that may contain their shared past.
Interleaved with his present crisis, the novel reaches back to February 1936, when Antonio was a medical student at the Café de Flore, drawn into bohemian Paris through an electric encounter with Marie-Thérèse and a mentorship with the exacting painter Théodore Jacobovitz. As the timelines converge, Antonio must confront whether the art that saved him was built on a wound he has never allowed to heal—and whether seeing Marie-Thérèse again will complete his life's work or destroy it.
Caged Soul will appeal to readers of Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow. It is a novel about art, exile, memory, and the cost of becoming who you were meant to be.
Antonio Castillo is the pen name of a physician and painter. An internist trained in France, he spent years studying classical painting alongside his medical career. His dual vocation—the diagnostic eye of a physician and the obsessive vision of a painter—informs his fiction's exploration of trauma, obsession, and the mind's capacity for reinvention.
Caged Soul is his debut novel.
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