A Great Love of Small Proportion — Colin Falconer

"Seville, 1489. The end of the Reconquista. Diego Sanchis is Seville's most famous painter; his tryptychs and murals fill every church in the city. He is also ugly, angry, possibly Jewish and a dwarf. Nobody but his father loves him and Diego likes it just that way. Until one day he is asked to take on a new student. Mercedes Goncalvez is the most beautiful young woman in the city, and her father is rich and powerful. What could such a woman possibly see in him? But there are many ways to see beauty. And beyond the dungeons of the Inquisition; beyond betrayal and torture; and even as the guns pound the heavenly gardens of the Alhambra, and the Moors prepare to leave Spain forever, Diego finds true beauty among the ashes of his last hopes. "