Joan Sales – författare

SPAIN, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo - a beautiful widow with a shadowy past - puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís'' son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city''s morale, she leaves to winter with Lluís'' brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on ''dead'' fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini''s decision will put her family''s fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, old friend and traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself. Joan Sales, a combatant in the civil war, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

"Perhaps the worst thing about war is the peace that follows . . ."Winds of the Night is the follow-up, published almost thirty years later, to Joan Sales'' acclaimed masterwork of the Spanish Civil War, Uncertain Glory.It describes the shell-shocked wasteland that was post-war Catalonia through the eyes of Cruells, a Republican chaplain who survives the war, and completes his theological studies only to lose his faith in a world where it seems all hope has been extinguished.As he struggles to function as a rural priest, his steps are dogged by a ghostly figures from his past, such as Lamoneda, a fascist agent provocateur who now hobnobs with Himmler and misses few opportunities to turn the febrile post-war atmosphere to his financial advantage. Against his wishes, Creulls is drawn into obsessive dialogues about the war in which only lunacy prevails, for Lamoneda seems to hold the key to the whereabouts of an old friend - the mercurial Juli Soleràs, whose charisma, for all his betrayals, still holds Cruells in thrall.An essential coda to the modern classic that is Uncertain Glory, Winds of the Night is a Beckettian vision of the traumas of combatants and country hidden beneath the rhetoric of the victors.Translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush