Fernando Aramburu – författare

The international bestseller, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2021. Fernando Aramburu's Homeland is an epic and heartbreaking story of two best friends whose families are divided by the conflicting loyalties of terrorism.‘It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book that was so persuasive and moving’ – Mario Vargas Llosa, author of Time of the Hero.The Basque Country, Spain, 2011.Miren and Bittori have lived side by side in a small Basque town all their lives. Their husbands play cards together, their children play and eventually go out drinking together. The terrorist threat posed by ETA seems to affect them little.When Bittori’s husband starts receiving threatening letters – demanding money, accusing him of being a police informant – she turns to her friend for help. But Miren’s loyalties are torn: her son has just been recruited as a terrorist and to denounce them would be to condemn her own flesh and blood. Tensions rise, relationships fracture, and events move towards a tragic conclusion . . .‘Is Aramburu the Tolstoy of the Basque country, author of a Spanish language War and Peace?’ – Guardian

From the author of Homeland, an emotionally gripping novel that blends a real-life event with an intimate portrayal of its aftermathInternational bestselling author Aramburu turns from the broad canvas of history to the private shadows of a Basque family shaken by unspeakable tragedy in this compact, intimate novel about trauma and it wake. Based on a real-life school explosion near Bilbao that killed fifty children in 1980, The Child follows one family—parents, grandparents, and the lost boy of the novel’s title—across the long, painful arc of grief. Aramburu’s gift lays in his ability to portray ordinary people with extraordinary humanity: small gestures, fleeting thoughts, contradictory impulses, the quiet heroism of resilience. The grandfather who refuses to believe the boy is gone; the parents determined to “be strong”; the town that both remembers and forgets—each is rendered with exacting truth and tenderness, in unadorned, piercing prose.