3 best books by Antonio Pérez Henares

Historical fiction is a genre in which several authors in charge of making a remote time more habitable built around official references, documentation or chronicles stand out. Because beyond what is known thanks to the direct testimonies that address the most momentous circumstances of each era, there is always that part of instinct, of care for detail to build a much more complete and complex reality.

A past world that ends up reaching us in the best way through characters who live far above that ruling party that constrains what could really happen in the widest universe of humanity.

Examples like those of Santiago PosteguilloJose Luis Corral Or until Perez Reverte they outline all those contours full of chiaroscuro. History is thus more complete and more accessible, when the great feathers delve into detail with that instinct and that insatiable thirst for knowledge that these writers and many others display on the known and on the anecdotal.

Antonio Perez Henares complements this Pleiad of great connoisseurs and storytellers. But in his case, the reach to the prehistoric provides that magical addition in which everything is extracted from intuition, scientific results and archeology.

Not that all his work focuses on these early days of the human being. But without a doubt, his saga in this regard, centered on what could have been the Iberian Peninsula, reaches a great literary value that almost borders on the anthropological.

Then there is much more in this author's bibliography. Because since he began his literary career, back in 1980, rivers of ink of his own production have also flowed in terms of essay work and articles. So, having a choice, we go there with:

Top 3 recommended novels by Antonio Pérez Henares

The song of the bison

A novel with which, for the moment, the saga on prehistory closes. And nothing better than to elaborate on a momentous change in the dust of our civilization.

In a recent blockbuster novel: The last Neanderthal, its author Claire Cameron raises this same Neanderthal-Sapiens transition point from a brilliant notion of absolutely empathetic storytelling.

This novel is no less so, which focuses on the great evolutionary dilemma that the arrival of the sapiens brought about. Perhaps intelligence was not the most relevant to survive the ice age. Not at least as a direct tool. And yet the Sapiens faced the Neanderthals to get hold of the minimum resources for survival.

A milestone that marked the rest of the millennia until today. Novelizing this moment is a challenge that is far exceeded in this plot that ends up overflowing in the details of a world looming over the abyss of forced change.

In this scenario we find the proto-men exposed to all their emotions and possible opposite instinctual attitudes, from protection to violence, with a rigorous presentation of tribal organization, communication systems towards that gradual conquest of the Earth over beasts and changing circumstances.

The song of the bison

The little king

The great fusion between Castile and Aragon left by the Catholic kings, was founded on well-earlier monarchs such as Alfonso VIII. The story of this king stands out as the experience of the boy forced to be a man to finally assert himself.

A descendant of El Cid, upon reaching his majority, Alfonso VIII already seemed to have his mission very clear after having undergone threats that forced him to take command even before his coronation had arrived.

Curiously married in Tarazona, as a nod to the other great peninsular kingdom: Aragon. In fact, in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, these details would add up so that all the nearby Christian kingdoms ended up joining against the Almohads.

However, the plot focuses on how this monarch got there. His foreseeable condition as the next monarch of Castile, when he was still a child, placed him among strained interests that threatened him on all sides.

Secluded in Atienza for his protection, those days with another child, Pedro, ended up forging a friendship turned into fidelity throughout their lives.

The little king

Cloudy

We finished as third and last place in my ranking, paradoxically, with what was the first novel of the prehistoric saga. Because if "The song of the bison" is a very powerful story about a world yet to be made, this start of the saga already anticipates the great interest in an arduous task of novelizing from the vestiges of what Prehistory can be considered as a novelistic plot.

For the occasion, the author focuses on the character of Ojo Largo. From this certainly impulsive young man a story is built in which we will live among primitive clans, knowing the roles and norms and assuming how the concerns and drives of those projects of human beings also served as an engine for conflicts and open struggles in which justice suffered. of processes.

Strength as a basic guideline and nature as a threatening bed for a young Long Eye willing to do anything for an uncontrollable nascent passion: love.

Other recommended books by Antonio Pérez Henares…

old earth

That of the emptied Spain already comes from old, very old. The curious thing is that little by little the matter is sounding like a privilege in an overpopulated world gripped by viruses delighted with the crowd. While the politicians on duty finish turning the matter around, let's talk about that Spain emptied since time immemorial in the style of a first-rate historiographer like Pérez Henares.

The stories of kings, nobles, battles and great warriors have been told, but those who repopulated the barren land were men and women who, with one hand on the stowage of the plow and the other on a spear, they risked their lives to repopulate the lost lands. So, when a dangerous troop lurked -and with it death- they drew the borders that we inherit today.

In this novel, Antonio Pérez Henares transports us, thanks to an evocative prose and an exhaustive historical rigor at a gallop between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to the borders of the Castilian extremity through the mountains, the alcarrias, the Tagus and the Guadiana.

Through its characters -Christians and Muslims, peasants and shepherds, lords and knights-, it shows us the history of those who sowed and reaped, of those who built hermitages and made passions, friendships, grudges, towns and experiences sprout. Those who gave humanity to the earth and became the seed of our nation.

4.5/5 - (12 votes)

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