Uncertain Glory [Paperback]

AKIRKUS REVIEWSBEST BOOK OF 2017

A classic Catalan work about love, family, and class during the Spanish Civil war.

Spain, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo—a beautiful widow with a shadowy past—puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís’s son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city’s morale, she leaves to spend the winter with Lluís’s brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on “dead” fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini’s decision will put her family’s fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, an old friend and a traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself.

Joan Sales, a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth, and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal,Uncertain Gloryis a homegrown counterpart to classics such asHomage to CataloniaandFor Whom the Bell Tolls.

“A masterwork that will seduce anew with its passion, humour, pathos and the all too-human spats of anger.”—Eileen Battersby,The Irish Times


In light of Catalonia’s current push for independence from Spain, the Catalan novelist Sales’s
Uncertain Glory— originally published in 1956 — could not be timelier. Longings for separate nationhood have roiled the area for generations, and in this new translation Bush offers a fresh look at the region through the context of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict English readers may best know in literature through writers likl³Y