by Antonio Soler

Original title: El nombre que ahora digo.

Translated by Kathryn Phillips-Miles & Simon Deefholts

ISBN 978-1-013693-31-2

Reviews

“I don’t like novels about the Spanish Civil War, but El nombre que ahora digo really blew me away.” – Paul Preston

“This is no mere account of events, it plunges us headfirst into the chaos and the horror and the squalor of war on a human level . . . it’s superb and horrific at the same time, an intensely powerful narrative.”  – Linda Palfreeman

” War is rarely pretty and Soler has written a first-class novel that clearly shows this.” – The Modern Novel

Synopsis

A young soldier, Gustavo Sintora, arrives in Madrid after Franco’s rebel forces capture Málaga. He is posted to the Republican army’s mobile entertainment unit who are billeted in a mansion on the city’s outskirts and put on shows for troops along the front line. There he meets Serena Vergara, a seamstress who is destined to become the love of his life.

As the war becomes darker and more intense, Sintora’s unit is sent into action on the Ebro front. Faced with the horrors of the battlefield and the inevitability of defeat, the unit gradually disintegrates and the soldiers go their separate ways. Sintora rushes back to Madrid, desperate to find Serena …

Soldiers in the Fog was first published in 1999 in Spanish, under the title El nombre que ahora digo and was awarded the prestigious Premio Primavera de Novela. A revised edition was released by Galaxia Gutenberg in 2020.

The Author

Antonio Soler was born in Málaga in 1956. His writing career began in 1992 with the publication of Extranjeros en la noche (Strangers in the Night), a collection of short stories and a novella. Since then, he has published more than a dozen novels, many of them award-winning, including Las bailarinas muertas (The Dead Dancing Girls) and El camino de los ingleses (Summer Rain), which was made into a film in 2006 by Antonio Banderas. More recently, he won acclaim with his novel  Sur(published in English under the same title by Peter Owen Publishers/Pushkin Press in 2023), which describes one day in the life of the city of Málaga through a cast of some 250 characters, as they endure the oppressive heat of the terral wind.

Support for the translation of this book was provided by: