The historical novel has in authors like Slav Galán o Emilio lara to those narrators necessary to give greater perspective on the facts, events and chronicles of days gone by. Because you have to learn from the official history, but to contextualize everything, nothing better than a good well-set novel in which the feelings of its characters convey that essential juice of intrahistory.
The question would always be clear that it is being fictionalized when one surrenders to the task of fiction. Nowadays, unfortunately, there are those who novel to end up transmitting the idea that they simply chronicle towards a more timely historiography. Always timely for the political interest of the day ... But that is another story and concerns "only" a few shameless writers.
Returning to Emilio Lara, writing his novels came to him with some seniority. But as I have always thought, the writer is on many occasions without being clear about it. In fact we are all budding storytellers, but that would also be another story.
Top 3 recommended novels by Emilio Lara
The clockmaker at the Puerta del Sol
When it comes to an argumentative foundation like this, there is no other than to applaud the idea and wait for how the development goes. Because raising a story from the anecdotal has both its point of charm and difficulty. In historical fiction, what is not based on official facts is plunged into darkness. But a watchmaker from the Puerta del Sol seems to be right there, on the other side of the hands that marked the time of an entire city and an entire country when the time came. And the idea of ​​discovering how and when that clock in Madrid began to be what it is today sounds absolutely captivating ...
José RodrÃguez Losada is forced, time and again, to flee from his past. After leaving the family home as a child, he was forced for political reasons to go into exile from the absolutist Spain of Fernando VII. Now he lives in London, a more advanced city where he sees a more hopeful future. Skillful like few others and always enthusiastic, he must finish an urgent task: to repair Big Ben, the most famous clock in the world.
But no one can escape his past and, through the London fog, a shadow watches him to end his life. And meanwhile, José only lives and works for his dream: building a watch with a revolutionary mechanism. Will José manage to avoid all the dangers that surround him and achieve his dream? History says yes, since his dream will be known as the Puerta del Sol clock. But how will he manage to avoid all the dangers and make it come true?….
Sentinel of Dreams
The Second World War would appear in all its harshness in London at the end of 1940 and until the middle of 1941. Never has a city suffered night and day of alternative bombings as cruel as those of the English capital. The Blitz was called that made it clear that the weapons already acquired in that great conflict an unimaginable destructive capacity. Again Emilio Lara flees from the usual narrative focus and guides us through alternative scenarios. Those places inhabited by characters with very unexpected fur that give back hope in a gray world.
London, 1939. The war has not yet broken out, but the city dawns day after day strewn with small corpses. Fear is spreading, and government advice to lead pets to eternal sleep is being heeded: thousands of dogs are euthanized. Soon come the simulated bombings and rationing, the escapes to the countryside of the wealthy classes, the speech of the stuttering king and the resistance plans of Prime Minister Winston Churchill; and also the conspiracies of the Duke of Windsor and his wife, Wallis Simpson, to return to the throne through a pact with Hitler ...
Meanwhile, life goes on. This is the story of Duncan, a heroic fox terrier, and his owner, Jimmy, the boy determined to save his dog from death. But also Maureen, a reporter for the Daily Mirror, and Scott, widower and father of young Jimmy. And many more. When the Battle of Britain breaks out, when the first bombs fall in the late summer of 1940, every life counts, and each one has a destiny to fulfill.
With great mastery and narrative pulse, Emilio Lara takes us into a story as unknown as it is captivating in which, amidst chaos, fear, flames and screams, the soul of the human being stands out, in its purest essence. Love, courage and conscience surround this Sentinel of dreams. Because there are times in history when it is easier to kill a man than a dog.
Times of hope
The plot in which the author takes us back to the Middle Ages still immersed in the deepest shadows of our civilization. But a time also in which we seem to see the awakening of humanism. As almost always, not precisely from the minds in power, capable of distilling hatred to persist in their status, but from more humble people. Persecuted and repudiated, punished per se. But it turns out that under the worst conditions is when the human being can only rely on the most fervent humanity with the neighbor to find a transcendent meaning to existence.
1212, year of the Lord. Europe is in full turmoil when an unequal troop of Crusader children advances through the kingdom of France, led by the shepherd boy Esteban de Cloyes in a feverish and jubilant atmosphere. Their objective: Jerusalem, which they plan to liberate without any weapon, with the sole force of faith. Meanwhile, the Almohad caliph al-Nasir prepares a powerful army in Seville to march on Rome, which lives in fear. He has sworn that his horses will drink from the Vatican fountains.
Religious fervor is mixed with hatred for the other, for the different. And the Jews are viciously persecuted, robbed and massacred. As will be some children of that historical and hallucinated crusade… Among those children is Juan, the son of a Castilian nobleman killed in an ambush, along with his companions Pierre and Philippe. Their steps will meet those of other walkers: Raquel and Esther, women who flee from anti-Semitic hatred and who only have each other; or Francesco, a priest of the Holy See who wants to save souls and bodies… and who will find his own salvation through love.
This is a love novel in years of hatred. A novel of wars, fanaticism and fear, but also of friendship, love and hope. A choral novel whose memory and characters will last forever ...
