Five books that put you in Spain. Three are by writers from Spain and set there, starting with The Shadow of the Wind and The Family of Pascual Duarte. The other two are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
Spain's most famous book is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. The medieval epic poem Cantar de Mio Cid is older still, and writers in Spain work in Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Basque. Camilo José Cela won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989; his The Family of Pascual Duarte is the brutal confession of an Extremaduran peasant in early twentieth-century Spain.
Benito Pérez Galdós's Fortunata and Jacinta is a sprawling nineteenth-century Madrid novel of class and marriage. The Civil War and the Franco years still shape much writing about the country: Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind is a Gothic mystery among the bookshops of post-Civil War Barcelona, and George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is a firsthand account of the war in Catalonia and Aragon.
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Gothic mystery in post-Civil War Barcelona, steeped in the city's streets, bookshops and the lingering weight of Franco-era repression.
Brutal confession of an Extremaduran peasant, capturing rural poverty and violence in early twentieth-century Spain.
Sprawling nineteenth-century Madrid novel of class, marriage and the city's middle-class and street life.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Spain.
Firsthand account of the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia and Aragon, capturing the militias, Barcelona's revolutionary mood, and the infighting on the Republican side.
Memoir of life in a remote Alpujarras village in the 1920s, detailing peasant customs, landscape, and daily rhythms of rural Andalusia.
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