The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Mac y su contratiempo [Mac and His Problem]. Mac is a bankrupt builder who plans to rewrite the (very poor) novel, in the form of interrelated stories, written thirty years ago by a Barcelona neighbour, now a moderately famous writer This novel is narrated by a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo de los almendros [Field of the Almond Trees], the sixth, last and by far the longest in his Magic Labyrinth series about the Spanish Civil War. The war is almost over at the start of this book, with the Republicans barely holding on to Valencia … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo del Moro [The Moor’s Camp]. This novel, the fourth book in Aub’s Magic Labyrinth series on the Spanish Civil War to be published, though the fifth in the series, is set during Fall of Madrid, which will end the Spanish Civil War. It opens on … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo francés [French Camp]. This is the fourth in Max Aub’s six volume Civil War series, El laberinto mágico (The Magic Labyrinth), though it was the fifth to be published. This one is set primarily in France, starting with the period immediately after the end of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo de sangre [Field of Blood], the third in his Magic Labyrinth series about the Spanish Civil War. The book opens in Barcelona on New Year’s Eve 1937. Barcelona is under bombardment by the Francoists. As in the previous book, we follow the lives of a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo abierto [Open Field], the second book in Max Aub’s Magic Labyrinth series about the Spanish Civil War, though the third to be published. This one is set in Valencia in the first part (where Aub grew up) and Madrid in the second part, leading up … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo cerrado (Field of Honour). Aub was born into a French Jewish family but the family moved to Seville when he was eleven and he adopted Spanish as his language. He is best-known for his series of six books called the Magic Labyrinth, set in the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Espido Freire‘s Soria Moria. This is the story of well-to-do English families living and working in Tenerife as the beginning of the last century, just prior to World War I. The Hamiltons have three daughters. Two are married but we mainly follow the youngest, the fourteen-year old Dolores. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Milena Busquets‘s También esto pasará (This Too Shall Pass). Busquets is the daughter of well-known (in Spain but not in the English-speaking world) publisher and writer Esther Tusquets. Tusquets died in 2012. This novel is about a forty tear old woman, Blanca, whose mother has just died. Though … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Espido Freire‘s Melocotones helados [Frozen Peaches]. This is a complex multi-generational novel which won the Premio Planeta in 1999. The first generation focuses on Esteban, who fought on the Franco side in the Spanish Civil War. At the end of the war, he goes to Desrein (all town … Read more