This book brought me hours of enjoyment, it was like traveling to Spain and experiment life in this country during the Civil War. The author masters the precise use of words to paint to us the scenery of the basque land, as well as to describe the tastes and smells of food in the different regions, it makes you want to be there, alongside the main character and his friends, helping them in their journey through a country at war. Must read!

As a Spanish speaker and admirer of the Spanish culture, I very much enjoyed this novel. For those of you who have traveled to Spain, or are thinking about it, this book does a great job of connecting you to important cultural elements of this great nation, while also giving you a better understanding of the tragic civil war that divided so many in the middle of the last century.

After getting this book, I waited until taking a long train ride to New York City to start reading. It was a wonderful way to make the trip pass quickly. Like the protagonist, William Benning, I too graduated from the University of Virginia and shared some of his early experiences in Charlottesville, VA which, although I was 35 tears later, create a bond between character and reader. Brian did a masterful job of showing us what it must have been like to travel to a foreign country slipping into war with itself.

Throughout William’s grueling journey are hundreds of colorful details, such as the farmers in carriages drawn by horses, the small towns with their early twentieth-century charm, medieval Cathedrals, the rough terrains of the beleaguered Basque country among others. Snowden’s contribution to the Civil War literature in Spain involves almost no depiction of actual fighting but rather its effect on people’s everyday lives as seen through his characters’ eyes, including innocents getting shot or taken prisoners, terribly scarred victims, and the almost equally traumatized survivors who have seen their loved ones getting brutally killed.

Snowden’s emphasis, in handling the war, is on people and their humanity—and their impact on Benning and his understanding of the world— rather than a story of battlefield heroism. He allows the many characters with whom Benning connects to tell their stories in intimate discussions. While he includes tense scenes of hiding and violence, his chief interest is in what it felt like to be alive in this place, at this time—a welcome, humane approach.