Guerra

An absorbing book that conveys the raw Spanish experience - its heat, dust, light and shade - with rare and startling actuality. Admirers of his first two books will have their high regard confirmed by this one. Newcomers should start here. They will not be disappointed * Literary Review * Written with considerable power and beauty * The Sunday Times * The term ""romantic traveller"", once used indiscriminately by Spaniards to describe any foreigner with a passionate interest in Spain, seems particularly applicable to Jason Webster... you are likely to be seduced by his powers as a storyteller * Independent * Squarely in the Almodovarian reality of contemporary Spain... goes straight to the heart * Tomas Graves * Webster's surely right to see the legacy of the war in terms of - often turbulent - undercurrents; for him it informs a little-known and largely nasty side of Spain... revelatory and rings true * The Scotsman * The book's raison d'etre are stories taken from his current surroundings that say something about Spain's ambivalent, deliberately amnesiac relationship with its past, and about ways in which that past continues today... shows that the Spanish Civil War is not only still imaginatively powerful but has lost none of its hold on foreigners * TLS * Proves himself a writer of true talent,stripping away the myth to reveal the bloody conflict for what it was... brilliantly evokes modern Spain, a shimmering haze of edginess and discontentment which beats down like the noonday sun, and he proves that the dark undercurrents of 70 years ago are still in evidence today * Wanderlust * There are many... dirty deeds recorded but, partly because of Webster's essentially happy character, his heartfelt prose and his deep love for modern Spain and its vibrant people, this positive and optimistic book leaves an impression of hope after the horror * Daily Mail * Perhaps only a foreigner, and a foreigner who lives in Spain, could give a truly accurate picture of how the memory of the Civil War still dominates so many people's lives in the country. In all its glare and gloom, this is what Jason Webster's vivid and perceptive journey through the tortured memory of modern Spain provides -- Professor Paul Preston It's great! Negotiates that difficult territory between being an outsider and a native and manages to take the reader along for the voyage... a fine and compelling book -- Thad Carhart, author of THE PIANO SHOP ON THE LEFT BANK