Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past [Hardcover]

Praise for "Ghosts of Spain":

"[Tremlett] paints a rich, multicolored canvas of one of Europe's most fascinating nations.""--Entertainment Weekly""This well traveled journalist...knows his subject as he ventures through the past to explain the present personality of a country so varied that even in modern times its complicated medieval legacy is part of everyday life." "--""Washington"" Times" (Ann Geracimos)
"Tremlett has written a smart and highly readable book that mixes incisive political history with sophisticated cultural reporting.""--""Seattle"" Times "(Robin Updike)
"[An] incisive and engaging book....[Tremlett's] sober analysis of how the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004...exposed deep fissures in Spanish society is the best report I've read on the subject....[A]n invaluable book. Indeed, since it appeared in Britain last year, 'Ghosts of Spain' has become something of a bible for those of us "extranjeros" who have chosen to live in Spain. A country finally facing its past could scarcely hope for a better, or more enamored, chronicler of its present."--"New York Times Book Review" (Sarah Wildman)
" [An] affectionate, deeply informed tour of the country.... a highly informative, well-written introduction to post-Franco Spain. Mr. Tremlett's taut recounting of the 2004 train bombings in Madrid makes especially timely reading, with the suspects now on trial."--"New York Times "(William Grimes)
"Mr. Tremlett['s]...affectionate yet critical intimacy with the country helps to make this book much more than an ordinary journalistic survey....Extended residency has...allowed Mr. Tremlett to gather off-beat stories distinctly revealing of his adoptedland."--"Wall Street Journal "(Francis X. Rocco)
"[A] provocative and vividly written book that is part history, part political and social commentary, and part love letter....This book should be in all public and academic library collections on Spanish history and culture." "-Library Journal"
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"Tremlett...went native almost immediately upon his arrival in Spain twenty years ago. He wants us to see, hear, touch, and taste exactly why....there are pages here on almost every exemplary, cautionary, and symbolic aspect of Old Spain and New."--"Harpers "(John Leonard)
"[A]n evocative, often poignant sojourn through the as-yet uncleared psychic mists of the civil war."--"Star-Tribune "(Michael J. Bonafield)

'Tremlett's lively and well-informed Ghosts of Spain is at once a history, a journalistic inquiry and a travel book.'

'Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Spain.'

'perceptive, affectionate, amusing and critical ... excellent.'

Guardian journalist Giles Tremlett travels through contemporary Spain examining the darker sides of it's history.

'a book of remarkable scope ... the author’s enthusiasm and his determination to capture this contemporary Spanish moment ... succeeds brilliantly.'

Spaniards are reputed to be amongst Europe's most voluble people. So why have they kept silent about the terrors of the Spanish Civil War and the rule of dictator Generalísimo Francisco Franco? The appearance - sixty years after that war ended - of mass graves containing victims of Franco's death squads has finally broken what Spaniards call ‘the pact of forgetting’. At this charged moment, Giles Tremlett embarked on a journey around Spain - and through Spanish history. Spaniards, he found, had tried to wipe both the Civil War and Franco from their memory. The graves were ‘secretos a voces’ - whispered secrets everyone knew about but did not discuss. History, Tremlett discovered, was a tinder-box of disagreements for Spaniards. Who caused the Civil War? Why do Basque terrorists kill? Why do Catalans hate Madrid? Did the islamist bombers who killed 190 people in 2004 dream of a return to Spain's Moorish past? The ghosts of the past were everywhere. Tremlett's journey was also an attempt to make sense of his personal experience of Spaniards. Why do they dislike authority figures, but are cowed by a doctor's white coat? How had women embraced feminism without men noticing? What binds gypsies, jails and flamenco? Why do Spaniards go to plastic surgeons, donate their organs, visit brothels or take cocaine more than other Europeans? Finding answers to those questions involved travelling some strange and colourful byroads.

Giles Tremlett is the Guardian's Madrid correspondent. He has lived in, and written extensively about, Spain almost continuously since graduating from Oxford University twenty years ago.