Patrice Chaplin flees South London aged 15 and ends up obsessed with Girona and the mysterious bohemian Josep Tarrésįrom September we'll continue the series. Noah Gordon's hero Josep overcomes murder, debt and isolation to build a prosperous wine business on a bare hillside, against the backdrop of General Prim's murder. Stephen Spender's story of anti-heroic ambivalence about what the hell he was doing in the Civil War.īarbara Wilson's comedy stands sex roles on their heads and explains Gaudí's buildings, whose architectural lines curved as much as her characters bent gender.ĭavid Hall brings off the trick of combining the pace of a classic crime novel with the unhurried, ironic narrative voice of its cultured, tough protagonist.Ĭaroline Roe's whodunit portrays 15th-century tensions and conflicts between Christians, Moors and Jews, through the wise Jewish physician, Blind Isaac. I slipped in Port Bou deceitfully, for it's not a novel at all, but a poem set on the frontier. Paul Scott's vivid, experimental novel of betrayal, despair and suicide on the Costa Brava.Īngela Jackson's epic on British women in the Civil War, reaching its climax in the Priorat mountains. As the Jews are expelled from Girona, Alba has to find strength in her past and religion to overcome lost love, family deaths and the destruction of her people. Spare and bleak book about Katherine's 1950s flight from Ireland to Barcelona to the Pyrenees and her fight for independence and understanding.

Three were crime novels, varied in style: Barbara Wilson's comic paean to sexual freedom David Hall's hardboiled detective story and Caroline Roe's more traditional mystery.Ĭolm Tóibín's first novel. All of these were sharply realised and integrated into the story, such as fictional villages on the Costa Brava (Scott), in the Pyrenees (Tóibín), in the Penedès (Gordon) or real villages, such as La Floresta (Hall), Portbou (Spender) and La Bisbal de Falset (Jackson). Girona, not Barcelona, was the privileged city: Graves and Roe both set their novels in its medieval Jewish quarter and Patrice Chaplin fell in love with that same city.

Nor, as one might think, have the books focused only on Barcelona, the capital that sucks resources and people from the rest of the country. Colm Tóibín's imagination puts across what the dictatorship felt like (history books try to tell us what happened) Paul Scott shows us the Costa Brava on the cusp of change from fishing-villages to tourist resorts Barbara Wilson's Cassandra is struck by the impact of Gaudí's buildings Lucia Graves and Caroline Roe explain the Jewish absence –or their presence, Graves believes– in the Catalan character today and Noah Gordon in a most detailed portrait of a Penedès village highlights the strength of Catalan tradition and identity. And several throw strong light on aspects of Catalonia, as fiction can so well.

Remedy For Treason by Caroline Roe