Sepharad

From one of Spain's most celebrated writers, an extraordinary, inspired bookat once fiction, history, and memoirthat draws on the Sephardic diaspora, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges to tell a twentieth-century story. Shifting seamlessly from the past to the present and following the routes of escape across countries and continents, Munoz Molina evokes people real and imagined who come together in a richly allusive patternfrom Eugenia Ginsburg to Grete Buber-Neumann, the one on a train to the gulag, the other heading toward a Nazi concentration camp; from a shoemaker and a nun who become lovers in a small Spanish town to Primo Levi bound for Auschwitz. From the well known to the virtually unknownall of Molina's characters are voices of separation, nostalgia, love, and endless waiting. Written with clarity of vision and passion, in a style both lyrical and accessible, Sepharad makes the experience our own. A brilliant achievement.

ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA is the author of thirteen novels and has twice been awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura (the Spanish equivalent of the National Book Award). He lives in Madrid.