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On August 19, 1936 Hercules the boxer stands on the quayside at Coruña and watches Fascist soldiers piling up books and setting them alight. It is a moment which transforms a young group of friends, who just weeks before had spent their days sunbathing beneath the lighthouse, into a broken generation.
Out of this incident during the early months of Spain's tragic civil war, Manuel Rivas weaves a colourful tapestry of stories and unforgettable characters to create a panorama of twentieth-century Spanish history. For it is not only the lives of Hercules the boxer and his friends that are tainted by the unending conflict, but also those of a young washerwoman who sees souls in the clouded river water and the stammering son of a judge who uncovers his father's hidden library.
As the singed pages fly away on the breeze, their stories live on in the minds of their readers.
"Starred Review. [A]ttentive readers will be rewarded by a rare find: an epic and resoundingly lyrical refutation of totalitarianism and cruelty." - Publishers Weekly
"It's time for reviewers and sundry pundits to quit the flattering comparisons with Lorca, Joyce, and García Márquez. Manuel Rivas reads like no-one else on the planet... one of those novels to lavish on friends... Manuel Rivas' sweeping novel, translated into English for the first time, is an undoubted classic."
- The Scotsman
"His boldest take yet on the war's repercussions in his native Galicia... a work of unusual beauty." - Financial Times
"This tour de force comes full circle in a unique literary enterprise." - The Independent (UK)
"[T]he stories come together, the quality of the prose stays consistently high, and it's worth being patient sorting through the cast of the novel as you wait for Rivas to tie everything together with a beautiful ending." - The Book Bag (UK)
This information about Books Burn Badly 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.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Manuel Rivas writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. A founding member of Greenpeace Spain, he is a major figure in Spanish literature, known for his journalism, as well as for his prize-winning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter's Pencil. His works have been translated into 20 languages.
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