Javier Cercas

Melchor Marín is back in a race against time to save his daughter.

In the third instalment of this award-winning best-selling series, Melchor Marín, now retired from the police force and living a quiet life as a librarian, has to cope with his most distressing nightmare yet: His teenage daughter, traveling with a friend in Mallorca, stops responding to his messages and vanishes into thin air. 

Faced with the lack of interest of the local authorities, Melchor travels to Mallorca to find Cosette on his own. On a hunch he suspects his daughter is in danger and he soon discovers that this is not an isolated case of a missing person but one more in a long list, always girls and often minors. 

In a remote part of the island there lives a Bluebeard more frightening and dangerous than the one in the folktale, who has fortified himself in a luxurious, impregnable mansion where he can act with total impunity. Until Melchor Marín finds him.

Melchor Marín is back, the maverick, ill-starred hero of the best-selling Terra Alta

Melchor Marín became a police officer for just one reason: to avenge the murder of his mother. Before that, he had been in prison, where reading Les Misérables would change his life. In the first installment of the series, during the investigation into the murder of the Adell couple, Melchor hit rock bottom and learned a hard lesson: that justice can often only be dispensed outside the law.

In Independencia, a confidential, sensitive case brings him back to Barcelona: someone is using a sex video to extort the city’s mayor. What at first looks like a shady political manoeuver also conceals a story of careerism, perversion and impunity among the upper classes of Barcelona, in which Melchor will find the opportunity to settle old scores.

"The main attraction is Melchor Marín himself ... who has not yet given up trying to crack the unsolved case of his sex-working mother". The Times- The Best Crime Fiction for July 2023

2023 Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation Winner
2019 Planeta Prize 

He was a fair man, but the world wasn't. A shocking thriller.

A terrible murder shakes the peaceful region of Terra Alta: The powerful owner of the company Gráficas Adell and his wife are killed after suffering horrible tortures. Melchor Marín is placed in charge of the case, a young policeman and voracious reader who arrived from Barcelona four years ago, with a dark past that has made him a legend in the force. This, he believes he has buried under his happy family life as husband of the local librarian and father of Cosette, a girl with the same name as the daughter of Jean Valjean, a character in his favourite novel, Les Miserables.

Starting from the crime, and thanks to its thrilling plot, this novel becomes a lucid reflection on the value of the law, the possibility of justice and the legitimacy of revenge. But above all it is the epic story of a man in search of a place in the world.

“This fierce story is about life and literature, and about what the latter can do to the former if it is brave and stripped-back. From the beginning to the end, this is a tense whodunit.” Lilian Neuman, Culturas, La Vanguardia

“In Cercas’ writing, the hero can never avoid being the result of a moral imperative that overwhelms him and obliges him to make unforeseen decisions. Externally Terra Alta represents a change in almost every aspect (crime, the Catalan police, and so on), but if you read beyond that outward appearance you discover that it remains faithful to the inner form of his novels, always in a position to draw the face of a hero who doesn't want to be one.” Abc

“The impeccable flow of Terra Alta as a crime novel, which will certainly widen Cercas’ reading public, will not prevent readers from identifying some of his deep constants. […] Cercas is not afraid to handle emotions and feelings, which, instead of toning down the narrative, deepen the impact made on the reader by a storyline of resounding efficiency. I said at the beginning that Cercas “in some ways” reinvents himself. No doubt he does, but his Melchor Martin is the indisputable carrier of the DNA of his defective heroes.” Dómingo Ródenas de Moya, El Periódico

“Cercas has spun an agile story whose mystery plot grips the reader right from the start and keeps the tension alive until the denouement with the overlapping purpose of stirring anaesthetized consciences.” Santos Sanz Villanueva, El Cultural

The U.S. Press: 

"Irresistible, a wonderful commingling of scrupulous realism and scandalous invention...the language here — furious, precise...It’s hard not to want to see where life, and Terra Alta, will take him next." Gareth Risk, New York Times

“Even the Darkest Night explores timeless issues of vengeance and mercy, good and evil, love and hate. It’s a sweeping romantic novel in the form of a police procedural. Readers in tune with its approach and concerns will be richly rewarded.” Wall Street Journal

"Part-investigative procedural, part-contemporary noir, Even the Darkest Night is at heart a revenge tragedy, a story of multiple betrayals and loyalties with a Cercas-trademark meditation on redemption.” Crime Reads

"'Even the Darkest Night,' winner of Spain’s most prestigious literary prize, asks big questions about justice, revenge and whether literature can change lives." Los Angeles Times

"[...] Cercas manages to give his readers something more valuable than your standard thriller. In Melchor Marín, Cercas has created a complicated and conflicted hero to follow through multiple books, unraveling the mysteries of his past while nurturing hope for the ever-elusive happy ending. In addition, he’s written secondary characters we recognize and greet on the page as old acquaintances, whose lives we know intimately and follow as eagerly as we would family members. And that human connection, my friends, is what makes an international bestseller — never believe otherwise." Los Angeles Review of Books

"Javier Cercas is one of the most brilliant and creative writers living today, and Even the Darkest Night is one of his best yet. A Barcelona detective heads into the countryside to solve a double murder; both the murders and the detective are not what they seem to be, as strange occurrences and secret histories begin to pervade the investigation." Crime Reads

The U.K. Press:

“Even the Darkest Night is the first in what promises to be an excellent series.” – Guardian 

 “Striking” – Barry Forshaw, Financial Times 

 “His description of the savage murders of an elderly couple does not make easy reading, but Cercas perfectly captures the fearful mood of a town in rural Catalonia after the crime.” – Sunday Times 

 “[A] maddening, ultimately moving murder mystery” – The Times 

 “A wonderful novel. I look forward to many more Melchor stories.” – A.N. Wilson, The Tablet

Italian Press:

"Le sue opere seducono, provocano, indispettiscono, perché il professore di Letteratura ha un’idea forte, quasi militante del romanzo, oggetto che spinge il lettore non solo a svagarsi ma a porsi delle domande su se stesso e sul mondo che lo circonda." TTL – La Stampa

"Il libro [Terra Alta], che in Spagna ha vinto il Premio Planeta, è uno di quelli che ha una superficie e trasparente, ma non il fondo: niente è scontato, i dialoghi sono serrati tra botta e risposta alternati a pause esplicative non troppo lunghe e mai noiose." Huffingtonpost

"Il varco tra la volontà del racconto e la realtà dell’episodio è il motore che innerva la scrittura di Cercas, creando una narrativa di straordinaria forza ed efficacia moderna." Il Giornale

"Cercas realizza un noir che tiene insieme i suoi vari talenti e le differenti anime della propria opera e, come nei suoi precedenti romanzi, cerca in Terra Alta di tenere aperte porte e finestre su altre realtà. Quello che la sua narrativa sembra rifiutare è in effetti l’immersione in mondi chiusi e claustrofobici. Cercas vuole sempre aprire su un altrove, che è, insieme all’opposto – la chiusura in spazi e luoghi ristretti – la sua doppia vocazione di scrittore profondamente spagnolo e insieme profondamente europeo, e ovviamente internazionale." Doppiozero

"Una storia avvincente, che cattura il lettore dalle prime pagine, e allo stesso tempo scuote profondamente le coscienze." El Cultural

French Press:

"Javier Cercas n’a jamais cessé de vouloir comprendre la tragédie de cette guerre civile, (...). Il poursuit cette quête dans **Terra Alta**, roman sur la vengeance, haletant jusqu’à la dernière page." Gilles Heuré, Telerama

"Cercas actionne en maître les rouages de l’horlogerie du polar. Tout est là (...). Tout est là mais la chair et le sang sont ceux des personnages." Damien Aubel, Transfuge 

"Troublant." Lire

"...une réflexion romanesque où se mêlent la noirceur des âmes et la persistance du souvenir. Un travail d’orfèvre, parfaitement réussi." Olivier Mony, Sudouest

"Ce n’est pas un polar, c’est beaucoup plus que cela car le personnage principal est une relecture à la fois de Jean Valjean et de Javert dans 'Les Misérables'." Oriane Jeancourt, France Culture

Spanish Press: 

 “This fierce story is about life and literature, and about what the latter can do to the former if it is brave and stripped-back. From the beginning to the end, this is a tense whodunit.” Lilian Neuman, Culturas, La Vanguardia

“The impeccable flow of Terra Alta as a crime novel, which will certainly widen Cercas’ reading public, will not prevent readers from identifying some of his deep constants."  Dómingo Ródenas de Moya, El Periódico

Prix André Malraux 2018 (France) 

El monarca de las sombras is a courageous journey into Javier Cercas’ family history and that of a country collapsing from a fratricidal war. The author revisits Ibahernando, his parents’ village in southern Spain, to research the life of Manuel Mena. This ancestor, dearly loved by Cercas’ mother, died in combat at the age of 19 during the battle of the Ebro, the bloodiest episode in Spain’s history.

Who was Manuel Mena? A fascist hero whose memory is an embarrassment to the author, or a young idealist who happened to fight on the wrong side? And how should we judge him, as grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation, interpreting history from our supposed omniscience and the misleading perspective of a present full of automatic answers, which fails to consider the particularities of each personal and family drama?

Wartime epics, heroism and death are some of the underlying themes of this unclassifiable novel that combines road trips, personal confessions, war stories and historical scholarship, finally becoming an incomparable tribute to the author’s mother and the incurable scars of an entire generation.

“Powerful… Lord of All the Dead will neither flatter liberal pieties nor assuage feelings of collective guilt. It may help Spaniards, and people farther afield, to better understand the lure of Fascism.” New Yorker

"Cercas is a marvelous writer, and his character studies of the elusive Mena are masterly." Kirkus Review

“Only Cercas could have written a novel like this, at the peak of his maturity as a writer; he is one of the best we have.”José María Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC

“A remarkable act of personal history: brave, revelatory and unflinchingly honest.” William Boyd

 “A powerful work of D.I.Y. history.” Giles Harvey , The New Yorker 

“As fascinating and erudite as anything Cercas has written, but his struggles with his family's past and the violence involved make this his most personal, touching and morally complex work.”Justin Souther, Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC

“Javier Cercas’s last book, The Impostor, is, in its compassion and generosity, one of the most accomplished books I’ve ever read. His new novel is even better . . . Moving . . . Beautifully achieved . . . There is no one writing in English like this: engaged humanity achieving a hard-won wisdom. It is powerful stuff.” David Mills, The Sunday Times

“Poignant and memorable . . . A lucid and immensely human study not only of the pity and futility of war but also of the enduring wounds it leaves in a society . . . Lord of All the Dead is a virtuoso performance from a writer who is able to be both a historian and novelist simultaneously . . . A powerful and strikingly original portrait of a country whose history is a nightmare from which it cannot wake.” Annie McDermott, Times Literary Supplement

“A brave, persuasive novel.” José-Carlos Mainer, El País

“An excellent novel . . . fascinating both in its exploration of the past and in the playful creativity of its own narrative.” Ángel Basanta, El Cultural

“An admirable novel, truly unique.” Alberto Moreiras, La Marea

“A book that moves, intrigues, and lucidly questions—along with offering answers—the collective importance of our most fateful, dramatic decisions as individuals.” Jesús Ferrer, La Razón

“A magisterial book on the hazardous trajectory of one man.”Jean-Claude Raspiengeas, La Croix

“The new apex of an already fascinating body of work.” Alexandre Fillon, Lire

 “A book even more radical, daring, and important than anything this greatest contemporary Spanish writer has ever attempted before.” Yann Perreau, Les Inrockuptibles

“A magnificent book.” Gérard de Cortanze, Historia

“A brave political and family history . . . One of the strengths of Lord of All the Dead is the breadth of its subject matter . . . In this elegant and penetrating narrative Cercas shows us how important it is that Mena’s life is not forgotten . . . Superb.”Nick Major, The Herald (Scotland)

“A subversive and disenchanted view of war in general and the Spanish conflict in particular, in a fine translation by Anne McLean . . . It can be moving, unexpectedly funny, racy, demotic, or deadpan.” Lee Langley, Spectator

“Cercas’s candid wranglings with how to tell this tale, his own deep discomfort and the grave maturity with which he acknowledges he can’t feel morally superior to Mena make him a wonderfully warm and wise guide.” Siobhan Murphy, The Times 

Prix du Livre Européen, 2016 -  Taofen Award (Pekín) 2015 - Premio Letterario Isola d’Elba ‘Raffaelo Brignetti’ (2016) - Premio Friuladria 'La Storia in un Romanzo' (Italia); longlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2018 (UK)- New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2018

This is a fascinating non-fiction novel saturated with fiction. However, the fiction is not provided by the author, but by Enric Marco. Who is Enric Marco? A Barcelona man in his 90s who claimed to be a Nazi concentration camp survivor. Marco was unmasked in May 2005 after chairing the Spanish survivors association for three years, giving hundreds of speeches, granting dozens of interviews, receiving important honours, and even moving some Spanish parliamentarians to tears when they met to pay tribute for the first time to the Republicans deported by the Third Reich. The story was reported around the world, making Marco the great, widely reviled imposter. Now, nearly a decade later, in this hypnotic thriller that is also a “banquet with many dishes” –narrative, chronicle, essay, biography and autobiography– Javier Cercas lays siege to Marco’s enigma, his truth and his falsehoods. Through this investigation, which covers nearly a century of Spain’s history, he delves with kamikaze passion and heartrending honesty into the deepest parts of ourselves: our infinite capacity for self-deception, our conformism and our lies, our insatiable thirst for affection, our opposing needs for fiction and reality, and the most painful areas of our recent past.

“ [The Impostor] vibrates with an insomniac energy. I did, too, while in its throes. There’s no looking away from it; it has the hot, charged energy of sitting through a trial. . . The brilliance of The Impostor is how Cercas connects Marco’s desire for reinvention with Spain’s national project of burying its history as it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. . . The language is precise, distinctive and delicious...” Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“A mesmerizing biography of a fraud. This rigorous work shines a light not only on the methods of the deceiver but the willingness of the deceived to accept such falsehoods.” Publishers Weekly, a starred and boxed review

“Cercas ponders the case from every angle: Is it possible, he wonders, that even with the evasions and lies, Marco might tell us something truthful about the experience of fascism? Even though he ‘needed to be admired, to be a star,’ might he not have something to say after all? Who doesn’t enjoy a little self-aggrandizing confabulation? The answers come slowly, deliberately, and certainly not definitively even as Marco transforms himself from man on the street to Holocaust survivor ‘just as, at a certain point, Alonso Quixano became Don Quixote.’” Kirkus Reviews

"Javier Cercas is one of Europe's most serious and attractive writers ... Cercas is not content with the easy story, in this case the unmasking of a false hero. He boldly searches for the hidden truths of his elusive subject and his times." Michael Eaude, Literary Review

"An insightful psychological study ... Both convincing and compelling.” Daniel Hahn, Spectator

"A fascinating, highly charged, scalpel-sharp dissection" Siobhan Murphy, The Times

"Masterly ... Cercas probes this mysterious  and extraordinary life with uncommon patience, uncommon skill and uncommon sympathy." Allan Massie,  Scotsman

"The Impostor is a humane, artistically responsible and civilised book" David Mills, Sunday Times

"This meticulous research reads like spy fiction.""Precisely the grades of doubt determine the fascination, or better: the suspense of the book." Cornelia Geissler, Frankfurter Rundschau

"The true story of a fake heroe -entertaining and useful, stimulating and alarming." Carsten Hueck, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

"Javier Cercas is considered the master of transferring contemporary events into literature". Claudius Wiedemann, Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung

"With that other life he invented, the protagonist wanted to be loved, and may now have achieved part of that late reward. We also love Cercas more after this book, which is quickly read but not soon forgotten." José Carlos Mainer, El País

“There’s no way of knowing whether Javier Cercas will write a better book than El impostor in the future. What is certain is that he’s published his best book to date.” J.M. Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC Cultural

Prix Méditérranée Étranger 2014 (Francia)/  Premio Mandarache Jóvenes Lectores 2014/ Premio Casino da Póvoa 2016 (Oporto, Portugal)/ Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2016.

In the late 1970s, as Spain was adrift between the death of Franco and the rebirth of democracy, people were moving from the poor south to the cities of the north in search of a better life. But the work, when there was any, was poorly paid and the housing squalid. Out of this world of limited opportunities a generation of delinquents arose whose prospects were stifled and whose rebellion would be brief and violent…

One summer's day in Gerona a bespectacled, sixteen-year-old Ignacio Cañas, known to his few friends as Gafitas, is working in an amusement arcade, when a charismatic teenager walks in with the most beautiful girl Cañas has ever seen. Zarco and Tere take over his pinball machine and his life. Thirty years on and now a successful criminal defence lawyer, Cañas has tried to put that long, hot summer of drugs, yearning and delinquency behind him. But when Tere appears in his office and asks him to represent El Zarco, who has been in prison all this time, what else can Gafitas do but accept.

A powerful novel of love and hate, of loyalty and betrayal, of true integrity and the prison celebrity can become, Outlaws confirms Javier Cercas as one of the most thrilling novelists writing anywhere in the world today.

English Pen Award (2011) - Mondello International Literature Prize Città di Palermo (Italy, 2011) -  Jean Morer Prize (France, 2010)- Spanish National Literature Prize (2010) -

In February 1981, Spain was still emerging from Franco's shadow, holding a democratic vote for the new prime minister. On the day of the vote in Parliament, while the session was being filmed by TV cameras, a band of right-wing soldiers burst in with automatic weapons, ordering everyone to get down. Only three men defied the order. For thirty-five minutes, as the cameras rolled, they stayed in their seats.

Critically adored novelist Javier Cercas originally set out to write a novel about this pivotal moment, but determined it had already gained an air of myth, or, through the annual broadcast of video clips, had at least acquired the fictional taint of reality television. Cercas turned to nonfiction, and his vivid descriptions of the archival footage frame a narrative that traverses the line between history and art, creating a daring new account of this watershed moment in modern Spanish history.

“Cercas provides a creatively imagined account of an event that should be instructive to students of evolutionary democracy…. those who stick with it will become immersed in its near-hypnotic power.”Kirkus Reviews 

"Cercas is major novelist who has written a fascinating account of a key event in Spain's recent history" The Independent

'A brilliant reconfiguring of a key event in contemporary European history. Audacious and wholly fascinating'” William Boyd

“Cercas writes that he originally tried to fictionalize the event and turn it into ‘a strange experimental version of 'The Three Musketeers’; that’s exactly how the book turned out, and he didn’t have to fictionalize a thing.” The New Yorker 

"Mr Cercas has written a persuasive, brilliant and absorbing book that has more contemporary resonance than even he might have imagined." The Economist 

"Javier Cercas returns to another crucial episode in the history of his country in this dense but gripping, almost Shakespearean account of soldiers, politicians, mixed motives and the lust for power. (...) His subtle intelligence, narrative gifts and intellectual honesty are outstanding." The Telegraph

"This book is captivating, rich in information and in reflections on power, image, and strategy for taking and keeping power. [...] The liveliness of the style is joined by the subtlety of the intelligence of the story, and the finesse of the reflection." Critiqueslibres.com

"Cercas does something more than place himself in the role of puppet master in Spain’s national drama. As the many readers of Soldiers of Salamis are already convinced, he brings back that element of strangeness and chance that already inspired Plutarch and Shakespeare." Le Point

"A challenge between the political and crime genres" "A challenge between the political and crime genres" La Stampa

"A superb mixture of historical focus, literary strategy, and personal background.” Merten Worthman, Literaturen

Javier Cercas' third and most ambitious novel was heralded in Spain as "daring," "magnificent, complex, and intense," and "a master class in invention and truth."As a young writer, the novel's protagonist—perhaps an apocryphal version of Cercas himself—accepts a post at a Midwestern university and soon he is in the United States, living a simple life, working and writing. It will be years before he understands that his burgeoning friendship with the Vietnam vet Rodney Falk, a strange and solitary man, will reshape his life, or that he will become obsessed with Rodney's mysterious past.

Why does Rodney shun the world? Why does he accept and befriend the narrator? And what really happened at the mysterious ‘My Khe' incident? Many years pass with these questions unanswered; the two friends drift apart. But as the narrator's literary career takes off, his personal life collapses. Suddenly, impossibly, the novelist finds that Rodney's fate and his own are linked, and the story spirals towards its fascinating, surreal conclusion. Twisting together his own regrets with those of America, Cercas weaves the profound and personal story of a ghostly past. 

It’s been more than 15 years since the publication of Soldiers of Salamis, one of the greatest literary phenomena in recent years. The novel achieved wildly successful sales and reviews, and established Javier Cercas as one of the most influential, essential authors of 21^st-century European literature.

In late January 1939, barely two months before the end of the Spanish Civil War, a group of Francoist prisoners are executed by firing squad near the French border by Republican soldiers fleeing into exile. Among those prisoners is Rafael Sánchez Mazas, founder and ideologist of Falange, poet and future minister of Franco, who miraculously manages to escape and hide in the woods. Pursued by the Republicans, he is discovered by a soldier who takes aim, looks into his eyes, and spares his life.

Sixty years later, a failed novelist discovers this buried wartime episode by chance. Fascinated, he starts researching the story to clarify the circumstances and unravel their meaning. Who was the real Rafael Sánchez Mazas? What really happened to him during the war? Who was the soldier who let him go? Why did he do it? What secret was hidden in his eyes?

“One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.” –Mario Vargas Llosa

“A marvellous book.” –Susan Sontag

“A masterpiece.” –Kenzaburo Oé

“It should become a classic.” –George Steiner

A hilarious learning novel in which no one learns anything. Almost twenty years after the publication of El vientre de la ballena, Javier Cercas, having consolidated his position as a fundamental writer on the European scene, accepted a fascinating challenge: to revise a book by the novelist he was and face his own origins. The result is a novel that is simultaneously recognisable and new, where the wisdom and effectiveness of the mature author enhance the freshness and humour of the young writer. In this way, the tragicomic experience of 30-year-old Tomás, immersed in a life transformation as profound as that of Jonas in the belly of the whale, gives rise to an extraordinary, delicious and melancholy tale full of unforgettable characters. The reader progresses as if through an ironic learning novel in which the only thing they learn is that there’s nothing to learn. Or that they can only learn if they accept the inextricable complexity of human relationships, the perplexities of the heart, and the illusions of happiness.

The Tenant is the mischievous story of Mario Rota, a linguistics professor whose life starts to unravel after he twists his ankle while out jogging one day. A rival professor appears, takes over his classes and bewitches his girlfriend. Where will Rota's nightmare end - and where did it begin?  Written with a supremely light touch, that witty novella is an enjoyable masterpiece that lingers long in the memory. 

"Javier Cercas is one of the hottest properties in contemporary Spanish fiction... Cercas is a superficially humorous and profoundly disturbing author. In his novels, reality is less convincing than fiction and fantasy never stranger than truth." –Amanda Hopkinson, Observe 

"Light, clever and enjoyable ... assured and accomplished." –Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph

"Javier Cercas has some twisty Nabokovian fun with the plot ... the stories convey a sense of a novelist at play." –Financial Times

The first short novel by Javier Cercas, the story of a crime where the essence of his work could be sensed: intelligent, ironic and metaliterary.

The Motive is a satire about a writer, Álvaro, who becomes obsessed with finding the ideal inspiration for his novel. First he begins spying on his neighbours, then he starts leading them on, creating a reversal of the maxim that art follows life - with some dire consequences.

Published for the first time thirty years ago, El móvil is an absorbent thriller that seems to contain the seed of the entire work of the author, today acclaimed as one of the greatest contemporary European writers.

"Both funny and sinister ... The Motive is a small comic masterpiece with a satisfyingly bleak ending ... It is a pleasure to read such original, haunting stories in which so much is said with such wit and insight and above all with such refreshing economy." Anne Chisholm, Sunday Telegraph

El móvil (The Motive) has been adapted into a movie in 2017 with the title  El autor (The author). Directed by Manuel Martín Cuenca, the movie is starred by Javier Gutiérrez, María León and Antonio de la Torre, and has won several prizes.  See trailer 

 “ [...] recounts in the first person the narrator’s memories of his student years at the University of Urbana, a time of parties and uncertainties marked by the presence of Nora, the enigmatic girl whose memory marks the protagonist’s foreseeable life beyond his return to Spain, his two marriages, his two children. Agile and contained, with no pretensions other than those it achieves, Cercas’ story manages to combine confidence and melancholy without sadness. The book ends by approaching the author himself from two perspectives, biography and bibliography, to prove that there’s life after Salamis. In fact, that’s where this story fits in, just like that splendid volume of articles by the same publisher: Una buena temporada (A Good While).” J.R.M. “Javier Cercas vuelve a América.” El País: Babelia. May 2002.

“So, literature. And mixed literature. Pleasurably mixed, like in a novel. Because if I’m not mistaken, any good chronicle aspires to a triple status: that of poem, essay and story. More humbly — or more incapably — mine renounce the first two categories in advance; at their best moments, they may tend toward the latter. In fact, they might be able to be read, one by one, as stories. As true stories.” That’s what Javier Cercas had to say about this work.

“The foremost Spanish author.” Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times / “The greatest living author.” Aldo Cazullo, Il Corriere della Sera / “I consider Javier Cercas one of the finest writers in our language.” Mario Vargas Llosa, El País

The most lucid, dazzling texts by a writer of international stature, finally collected together in an anthology that makes for compulsive reading.

No callar tackles everything from the hottest defining issues of the current historical moment (populism, post-truth and fake news, storytelling, surveillance capitalism, threats to democracy, new authoritarianisms) to their repercussions in the Spanish world (a review of the Transition and the Civil War, the disorientation of the left, the discredit of the institutions, partocracy, the lack of consensus, etc.), and the local manifestations of all this, such as Catalan secessionism.

These "readings of the present", which exemplify Javier Cercas' social awareness and commitment, are complemented by intelligent reflections on the value of journalism and Spanish and international literary life, together with memorable portraits of personalities from cinema, music, sports and literature. Thus, this anthology offers a brilliant analysis of this day and age, while also constituting a personal manifesto on the issues that matter most to us, written by one of the most relevant European authors.

“Cercas' book is honest. Do you know anything more important that shapes a person's thinking?” El Periódico

“A inimitable voice. [...] A voice that has made Javier Cercas a classic of contemporary journalism because it propounds a new form of awareness.” Babelia, El País

“The author of Soldiers of Salamis delivers a profound, solidly articulated writing and doesn't shy away, on the contrary, from controversy, which adds liveliness. [...] A remarkable book.” Culturas, La Vanguardia

“No callar is equivalent to Kafka's letters and diaries, or David Foster Wallace's essays, or the compilations of articles by Mario Vargas Llosa himself. Its pages not only invite us to delve into the intellectual intricacies of one of the most lucid and erudite minds of our time, but also serve as a compass to explore what lies beneath the literary map of one of the finest Spanish-language writers of recent decades.” Jot Down

A key book for understanding the narrative of our time.

The blind spot is an area of shadow, a territory of delicate but unequivocal delimitation: it concerns the essential question contained in some of the great literary classics. What does the whale Moby Dick represent? Is Don Quixote really crazy? Is Josef K. innocent or guilty? Who kills the Slave in The Time of the Hero? Any restless reader turning the last page of these novels will come up with multiple answers and interpretations. These touch on the very enigmas of existence, and can therefore never be resolved with a single, definitive answer. This unsolvable mystery, which escapes the control of the reader and even the authors themselves, gives rise to a masterly formulation of literary theory destined to become canonical. 

This essay is based on lectures delivered by Javier Cercas as part of the Weidenfeld Chair Lecture Series at Oxford University. 

Starting with Don Quixote and his own experience as a writer, Cercas launches out into a consideration of the most challenging fiction of the last hundred years, from Kafka, Borges, Perec, Calvino and Kundera, to Sebald, Coetzee, Barnes, Foster Wallace and Knausgård. First, he defines and celebrates certain aspects of the novel in the twenty-first century which are also features of Cervantes' masterpiece: its essential irony and ambiguity, its total commitment to innovation, its natural, joyful and omnivorous desire to cram the whole world within its pages, and its intricate concern with fiction and reality. Then he moves on to consider the actual meaning of the novel, the uncertain and discredited role of the writer as intellectual, and the role of the reader in the creation of a form whose aim is to tell the truth by telling lies.

The result is a dazzling short book which provides a new interpretation of novel from Cervantes and Melville to the present, and which will be as stimulating for readers and writers of literature in the twenty-first century as E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel or Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel were in the last.

“Don Quixote does not resolve whether Quixote is or isn’t mad, anymore than The Trial tells us what crime Joseph K. has committed. The answers to these questions, like the retina’s blind spot, must be supplied by the reader’s own brain, who thus becomes an active creator of the novel’s meaning, replenishing with his living memory, his own values and his own understanding, the indeterminate space that the novel leaves open”—Domingo Rodénas, El Periódico 

"..both scholarly and accessible, driven by Cercas’s enthusiasm, and provoking, for like the novel form itself Cercas’s worrying away at defining its possibilities is infinitely entertaining. [...] Intelligent, refreshing and a bracing look at what is a novel, what lies at the core of some of the great novels and with just enough of Cercas’s autobiographical thoughts to point you towards reading his own novels." –James Doyle, Bookmunch

This book is comprised of columns, lectures, prologues, epilogues, essays. They are not in chronological order. Their arrangement is intended to show ways of being in the world – public and private – at different times in the author’s life: with more or less optimism, more or less bitterness, more or less innocence.

And always, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end, Cercas is a monstrous smuggler of enthusiasm, an analogue-multimedia system that shoots out names, titles and author quotes with the passion of an amateur reader and the hypertrophic intelligence of an obsessed intellectual, awakening in the reader an unhealthy eagerness to devour it all with the same gluttony with which they’ve devoured it before.” Leila Guerriero

Writer and film director David Trueba was one of the friends to whom Javier Cercas gave his novel, Soldiers of Salamis, as soon as it was published. Around June 2001, before the explosion of the "Salamis phenomenon", Trueba had already decided that, after The Good Life and Masterpiece, his third feature film as a director would be an adaptation of that novel. Filming began in March 2002 and lasted eleven weeks. At that time, the novel – which was initially destined to become a cult book, at best – had been consolidated as "something more than a novel". Soldiers of Salamis had been at the top of the bestseller lists for several months and was in the process of accumulating national and international recognitions. Even now, this process doesn’t seem to have ended.

A Barcelona photographer, David Airob, did a formidable job of capturing certain moments during the making of the movie. For an exhibition of his work, Airob asked Cercas and Trueba to write brief captions for the photos. They thought it would be nice to bring them together in a book, an initiative that immediately seduced the novel’s publishers. To accompany the photos, they thought it would be interesting to add conversations between the writer and the director.

This is a series of articles and short essays published in media such as Diari de Barcelona and Quimera. It’s not just another miscellany: revised and placed in order by the author, these texts offer many keys to Cercas’ literary works: from his peculiar, and intriguing, thesis on the concept of the novel to the role of intellectuals in today’s society, and even his ever-amusing analyses of his “bedside” writers’ works (from Borges to Bioy Casares, from Paul Auster to John Irving), making this book a sort of intellectual autobiography. This is also how Cercas himself interprets it: “Oscar Wilde used to say that literary criticism is the only civilised form of autobiography that exists. I don’t know if the papers I now bring together belong to the genre of literary criticism; on the other hand, I am convinced that the story they tell is always autobiographical.”

A critical volume based on the research for Cercas’ doctoral thesis, presented at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1991.

A year after his death, this is a tribute to Gabriel Galmés and his work. Galmés was a writer who managed to discreetly and elegantly achieve narrative rigour and ferocious humour from his watchtower in Manacor. His was a universal view of the everyday successes and failures of men and women lost in the chaotic rhythm of urban life. This Album offers the reader unpublished texts and a minimal selection of journalistic articles. It is supplemented by a graphic portion and texts with a biographical and testimonial air, written especially for the occasion, documents that provide a clear profile of Gabriel Galmés and his writing.

The new edition of Soldiers of Salamis, an essential novel of the 21st century, thoroughly revised by the author and topped by an illuminating epilogue written by himself.

The graphic edition of an essential novel in the Spanish narrative. Towards the end of the civil war there was, close to the border with France, a shooting of prisoners from the Franco dictatorship. One of them made it out alive, thanks to a young republican soldier, and he was able to take refuge in the forest. It was Rafael Sánchez Mazas, a poet, the founder of the Falange and the future minister of Franco. Sixty years later, a novelist, who is in a very low point in his life, unearths this war episode and, fascinated by it, intends to investigate and clarify its circumstances. Soldiers of Salamis, Javier Cercas's novel originally published in 2001, has been hailed as a modern classic  by, among others, Kenzaburo Oé, Susan Sontag, George Steiner or Mario Vargas Llosa. We present now a meticulous graphic adaptation Illustrated by Jose Pablo García, one of the Spanish comics authors with more international projection.

Javier Cercas’ writing can be recognised by the inextricable mix of genres that coexist in his works, and the ease with which he moves from fiction to non-fiction. His novels almost always include an essay-like component, and often contain elements of chronicles, false autobiographies and literary and historical discussion. This hybrid nature can be seen in La verdad de Agamenón. The pieces of this miscellanea are grouped into four parts: Autobiographies contains stories about journeys, certain passions and personal memories. Letters of Battle features texts that are almost always vindictive and controversial, regarding our recent history and literature. New True Stories contains hilarious stories that do not escape the emotion or commitment of the author’s own memory. Finally, The Contemporaries includes exercises of admiration and dialogue with certain writers close to the author’s literary activities. In all of these, we can see that duality of criticism and narration, of personal and intellectual experience and erudition that is the essence of Cercas’ novels.

El hombre que se perdió, de Francesc Trabal, Quaderns Crema

La gran novel.la de Barcelona, de Sergi Pàmies, Anagrama

The country of the blind, de H.G. Wells, Anagrama

The doctor in the wall, de H.G. Wells, Anagrama

The story of the late Mr. Eleversham, de H.G. Wells, Anagrama

No se sap mai, de Inmma Monsó, Tusquets

Guadalajara, de Quim Monzó, Anagrama