A fictional diary set in interwar Germany and Spain allows us to peek into the life of Klara Philipsborn, the only Communist in her merchant-class, German-Jewish family. Klara's first visit to Seville in 1925 opens her eyes and her spirit to an era in which Spain's major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, shared deep cultural connections. At the same time, she is made aware of the harsh injustices that persist in Spanish society. By 1930,...

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In...

"October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer's son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with...

"Abril de 1937. Mientras en Espąa transcurre la guerra civil, el marino mercante Miguel Jord̀n Kyriazis es enviado por el bando sublevado para atacar de modo clandestino el tr̀fico naval que desde la Uni̤n Sovǐtica transporta ayuda militar para la Rep͠blica. En la base de operaciones, una pequęa isla del mar Egeo, la vida del corsario espąol se cruzar̀ en turbio trìngulo con la de los propietarios, el bar̤n Katelios y su esposa: una seductora...

Odelle Bastien, a Caribbean émigré living in London in 1967, discovers a painting rumored to be the work of Isaac Robles, a young artist of immense talent and vision whose mysterious death has confounded the art world for decades. As she tries to sort through the conflicting stories of its discovery, she does not know who to believe, including her art gallery colleague, Marjorie Quick. The mystery surrounding the painting includes Olive Schloss,...

This novel continues the stories of five interrelated families who struggle with social, political, and economic turmoil in the mid-twentieth century, during which they witness the rise of Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the horrors of World War II. It picks up right where the first book left off, and continues up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs. Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, finds her life...