"Before he became the Pope, there was a boy in Flores who played at giving Mass with a cardboard box."

The Man from Flores is a deeply human biographical novel that portrays the origins of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the man the world would come to know decades later as Pope Francis.

Based on true events, with a lyrical, intimate, and profoundly emotional narrative approach, this work invites us to walk through the lesser-known years of the future pontiff: his childhood among basil and silence, the illness that marked his body and soul, his work as a chemical technician, his first loves that never blossomed, and that definitive moment in a half-empty church when he realized that God was not calling him from above, but from within.

This is not an official portrait. It is not a hagiography. It is a novel.

And like every true novel, it does not seek to explain a public figure, but to explore private life — the soul's tremors, the contradictions that shape a human being before he becomes a symbol.

From the streets of the Flores neighborhood to the silent hallways of the Jesuit novitiate, this work traces the spiritual journey of a young man torn between the desire to love and the call to renounce; between tango and the Gospel; between pain and faith.

Claudio Sánchez tells the story with a delicate, poetic, and unadorned style, without idealization. Each scene smells of bread, tobacco, and soup steam. Every character speaks little, but says much. And each chapter leaves the reader with the feeling of having met a man who, before dressing in white, learned to love in a whisper.

A story about childhood, vocation, silence, and mercy.

A story that begins with a boy gazing into the fire, and ends with an old man remembering the basil his mother once grew.

An intimate portrait of Pope Francis as it has never been told before.