Winter In Madrid: Summary and book reviews of Winter In Madrid by C.J. Sansom, plus links to an excerpt from Winter In Madrid and a biography of C.J. Sansom.
Winter In Madrid
by C.J. Sansom
Hardcover: Jan 2008,
544 pages.
Paperback: Jan 2009,
544 pages.
Fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong will fall in love with Winter in Madrid, the arresting new novel from C. J. Sansom. In September 1940, the Spanish Civil War is over and Madrid lies in ruins while the Germans continue their march through Europe. Britain stands alone as General Franco considers whether to abandon neutrality and enter the war.
Into this uncertain world comes Harry Brett, a privileged young man who was recently traumatized by his experience in Dunkirk and is now a reluctant spy for the British Secret Service. Sent to gain the confidence of Sandy Forsyth, an old school friend turned shadowy Madrid businessman, Brett finds himself involved in a dangerous game and surrounded by memories.
Meanwhile, Sandy’s girlfriend, ex-Red Cross nurse Barbara Clare, is engaged in a secret mission of her own—to find her former lover Bernie Piper, whose passion for the Communist cause led him into the International Brigades and who vanished on the bloody battlefields of the Jarama.
In a vivid and haunting depiction of wartime Spain, Winter in Madrid is an intimate and riveting tale that offers a remarkable sense of history unfolding and the profound impact of impossible choices.
Themes of power and fate resonate throughout the novel, and are revisited particularly at the end. Whether or not the conclusion is fitting is up for interpretation. (Reviewed by Lisa A. Goldstein).
The Daily Mail
Sansom's action-packed thriller is a classic tale of old loyalties pitched against new ideologies. Its portrait of murderous corruption, ranging from the Monarchists and Falangists in the government to the diplomats at the British Embassy, shows Franco's Madrid to have been even murkier than Harry Lime's Vienna.
Kirkus Reviews
Wise and melancholy and, eventually, very tense.
Publishers Weekly
This moving opus leaves the reader mourning for the Spain that might have been-and the England that maybe never was.
Dublin Evening Herald
Not since Robert Harris...have I come across a writer who captures the mood of an era so succinctly and graphically. It's as if Winter in Madrid were written in sepia...Winter in Madrid is not only a crash course in the politics of the era but serves as a marvellous primer on the duplicity and treacherousness of our species and yet gives us hope that there are exceptions to these terrible generalisations. Highly recommended.
The Independent (UK)
Various literary ghosts haunt this novel. There are touches reminiscent of Graham Greene, such as the threatening eruptions of the brutal Falangists, after the fashion of the Tontons Macoute in The Comedians. Hemingway's here too, in the terse prose. But Sansom transfigures his sources into a moral universe very much his own. The sexual and moral equivocation is handled with cool assurance.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by P. Hawkins "Winter in Madrid" and the Shardlake Series Mr. Sansom has the potential to be a great writer, but falls short of that goal. Any author that overuses words or phrases leave something bitter in his or her writings. In fact, throughout the four Shardlake series, I began to count the very... Read More
Rated of 5
by J. CRESSMAN Winter in Madrid A grey, cheerless,morbid tale of Spain's dreary civil war, written, I suspect by an author quite lacking in faith, hope or positive outlook. One might gather, by his writing, that Sansome, is an unhappy Left-winger--Too bad. Not, in a book that you... Read More
Spain has been through
much political upheaval
since General Franco's time.
Following his death in 1975,
parliamentary democracy was
restored. Since then, Spain
has tried a military-backed
government, as well as ones
led by the Spanish Socialist
Workers Party (PSOE), and
the People's Party. The
People's Party was in office
from 1996 until 2004, when
the PSOE won office in the
aftermath of the March 11
terrorist bomb attacks in
Madrid.
Since the 1920s, the
British Secret Service has
been properly referred to as
the Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS). During the
1930s, the title "M16" was
adopted as a "flag of
convenience"...
Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love,
Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.
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(650 words).
of 5
by P. Hawkins
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