Historical novel reviews
The best-selling author par excellence in Spain is Matilde Asensi. New and powerful voices like that of Dolores Redondo They are approaching this honorary space of the Alicante author, but they still have a long way to go to reach her. In her extensive career, by profession, subject matter and number of…
Popular maxims and sentences should always be taken as guidance, on any aspect to which they are applied. I say this because the fact that it is more difficult to stay than to arrive would serve the case of Ildefonso Falcones. He arrived, reached the summit and, despite the difficulty of maintaining attention...
I met Luis Zueco on a torrid and Zaragoza 23 April a few years ago. Dizzy readers passed by Paseo Independencia among so many books exhibited on that radiant Saint George's Day. Some requested the signature of rigor while others observed from the other side in case ...
As a result of reading the book The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, by Larss Mytting, I evoked the participation of the great Robert Graves in the battle that took place in that French region of the Somme, where more than a million soldiers died and in which Own …
What better title than this? Something light, light, sibilantly pretentious. Before dying, yes, better the fewer hours beforehand to listen to it. That's when you will take your list of essential books and cross out Belén Esteban's best-seller, the one that closes the reading circle of your life... (it was a joke, a macabre one...
To understand reality you have to take a long path towards the origin. The evolution of any human-mediated event always leaves clues to be discovered before reaching the hurricane epicenter of everything, where an unintelligible dead calm can hardly be appreciated. The chronicles erect myths and their…
At the time I wrote my entry on the best books by Ken Follett. And the truth is that, with my taste for going against the current, I ended up setting three great plots that diverted the general view of the best-known works of the great Welsh writer in recent times. But with the…
There comes a time when the popular imagination is invaded by regrettable circumstances. In war there is no place for legends beyond the dedication to survival. But there are always myths that point to something else, to a magical resilience in the face of the most unfortunate future. Between …
The war intrastories make up the most noir scenario possible, the one that awakens aromas of survival, cruelty, alienation and a remote hope. Claudel composes this mosaic of stories with a diversity of focuses depending on the proximity or distance with which each narration is sighted. The short narrative has that great…
After some hesitant literary beginnings between genres as disparate as historical fiction and the current romantic genre (that kind of rosy stories), Hilary Mantel ended up being a consolidated author of the historical. Under the umbrella of this genre, she was able to win two Booker prizes twice,…
Probably the most original Spanish writer of historical novels is Santiago Posteguillo. In his books we find pure historical narrative but we can also enjoy a proposal that goes beyond historical facts to delve into the history of thought or art or literature. The originality …
A few months after appearing in Galician, we can also enjoy this great little story in Spanish. Knowing the taste of Manuel Rivas for squeezing the intrahistorical (and until the moment of being touched by his pen even anecdotally), we know that we are facing one of those committed plots and…