Book Summary and Reviews of The Palace at the End of the Sea by Simon Tolkien

The Palace at the End of the Sea by Simon Tolkien

The Palace at the End of the Sea

A Novel

by Simon Tolkien

  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • May 2025, 444 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A young man comes of age and crosses continents in search of an identity―and a cause―at the dawn of the Spanish Civil War in a thrilling, timely, and emotional historical saga.

New York City, 1929. Young Theo Sterling's world begins to unravel as the Great Depression exerts its icy grip. He finds it hard to relate to his parents: His father, a Jewish self-made businessman, refuses to give up on the American dream, and his mother, a refugee from religious persecution in Mexico, holds fast to her Catholic faith. When disaster strikes the family, Theo must learn who he is. A charismatic school friend and a firebrand girl inspire him to believe he can fight Fascism and change the world, but each rebellion comes at a higher price, forcing Theo to question these ideologies too.

From New York's Lower East Side to an English boarding school to an Andalusian village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Theo's harrowing journey from boy to man is set against a backdrop of societies torn apart from within, teetering on the edge of a terrible war to which Theo is compulsively drawn like a moth to a flame.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"In epic fashion worthy of his namesake, Tolkien crafts a remarkable novel of an American boy swept up by love and circumstance and cast into the crucible of the Spanish Civil War. Intense, vivid, and moving." ―Mark Sullivan, bestselling author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky and All the Glimmering Stars

This information about The Palace at the End of the Sea was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Simon Tolkien Author Biography

Simon Tolkien was born in England in 1959 and grew up in a small village near Oxford. His grandfather was J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of The Rings. He studied Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford and then went on to become a successful barrister specializing in criminal justice, and, according to British custom, he appeared on behalf of both the prosecution and the defense. He now lives with his wife and two children in Southern California.

Tolkien's first novel, Final Witness, was published by Random House in 2002 and has been translated into eight languages. His second novel, The Inheritance, was published by Minotaur Books in April 2010 and was followed by The King of Diamonds a year later. All Tolkien's novels are published by Harpercollins in the UK. His ...

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