El monarca de las sombras (Spanish Edition)

More than fifteen years after publishing Soldados de Salamina, Javier Cercas returns to the Spanish Civil War with a more intimate and personal novel that examines the uncomfortable history of his own family. No family escapes its inheritance. El monarca de las sombras traces the lost history of an almost anonymous young man who fought for an unjust cause and died on the wrong side of history. Manuel Mena joined Franco's army when the Civil War broke out in 1936 and died two years later fighting in the Battle of the Ebro. For decades he was celebrated as an official family hero—he was Cercas's great-uncle. Cercas long refused to investigate his story until he felt compelled to do so. The result is a novel that explores the radiant, multifaceted, and mysterious nature of heroism, the stubborn persistence of the dead, and the difficulty of confronting uncomfortable history. It addresses themes central to Cercas's work while offering an unexpected perspective on the legacy of war he first examined in Soldados de Salamina.