There is a famous anecdote about the Basque-born writer Miguel de Unamuno (b.1864), which Hugh Thomas documents in his excellent book, The Spanish Civil War. Much to the horror of his socialist friends, Unamuno, a rector at the University of Salamanca, had supported the Falangist uprising - but was then left in a state of shock by the growing canon of atrocities inflicted on Republican friends and intellectuals. It all came to a head at a poisonous public celebration of Colum

Last week it was the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, Spain's most celebrated writer. His flagship work, Don Quixote is the story of an ageing knight who can't separate fact from fiction. But how do we separate fact from fiction when it comes to the author's own life? What we know about Cervantes the man comes from his own quill - fleeting cameos in fictional narratives. Can we gain a clear picture of who he was from these cameos in his books? Is there a

This week in book review it's Eduardo Mendoza's science fiction parody, Sin Noticias de Gurb, in which two alien shapeshifters explore Barcelona eating churros and observing the banal but hilarious paradoxes of a consumerist society. '0.01 (local time) Landing effectuated without difficulty. Conventional propulsion (amplified). Velocity of landing: 6.30 on the conventional scale (restricted)- 07.00 Obeying orders (mine) Gurb prepares to make contact with life forms (real and

This week in Book Review we delve into a well-preserved layer of Barcelona's history. Based on author Albert Garcia Espuche's own excavations at the Mercat del Born Cultural Centre, Barcelona 1700 provides a surprisingly lucid vision of life in the rebellious city before it was destroyed during Felipe V’s year-long siege in the Spanish War of Succession. The unprecedented archaeological finds are dusted off and categorized to piece together a picture of real citizens; where t

This week in Book Club: Spanish realist Pio Baroja’s semi-autobiographical account of a medical student in an existential pickle in turn-of-the-Century Madrid. Baroja's most acclaimed novel, The Tree of Knowledge is a fiercely critical portrait of late-19th Century Spain and the frustrations of a young progressive trying to make a career for himself in its languishing society. El Árbol de la Ciencia is Pio Baroja’s study of the career and attitude of a late 19th Century medic

This book followed on from the immense success of another piece of Barcelona period fiction - Zafon's The Shadow of The Wind - onto the international bestseller list, establishing the emergence of a new wave of extremely popular Spanish hist-lit authors. An epic journey from serfdom to nobility woven around the construction of the magnificent Santa Maria del Mar church in Barcelona, La Catedral del Mar tells the story of Arnau Estanyol, the son of a 14th Century peasant who h

‘There are men who are born smeared in a patina of moral oil; misfortune slides off them like water. But those same men stain everything they touch.’ Victus is a dirty, foul-mouthed, bloody-nosed, big, heavy, long novel about a period in history no historian has ever succeeded in representing as interesting; the dreaded Spanish War of Succession. It’s a period where Europe goes to war in Spain, signs a load of pacts, betrays each other and decides to get out while it still ca

‘Sometimes we give to the devil what he already has.’ The historian and novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte shaped his career as a war correspondent. Between the mid-70s and the early 90s, he reported on Eritrea, Mozambique, Chad, the Lybian Crisis, the Sahara, and the Falklands War, among other conflicts, becoming one of Spain’s most widely read writers. While he has written a host of successful, full-throttle battle-fiction books, including Cabo Trafalgar (2004), El Husar (1986)

This week, a postmodern take on the hardboiled detective novel, the Planeta-award winning and internationally acclaimed Los Mares del Sur, by food-obsessed Catalan writer Manuel Vazquez Montalbán. ‘Three months without eating a rosco,’ begins the second chapter of the Barcelona-based detective novel The South Seas. ‘Not a whiff of a husband looking for his wife. No father looking for his son. No idiot trying to prove his wife’s adultery. What’s going on? Don’t women run away