by Julian Zabalbeascoa
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Spain, 1936. A military coup. A country tearing itself apart. And twenty voices — soldiers, mothers, priests, children, journalists — each carrying a piece of what happened next. Julian Zabalbeascoa’s debut novel follows the Spanish Civil War through a chorus of narrators, centering on a young Basque man who leaves his village to fight for democracy and a writer in Bilbao who refuses to stay silent. It’s been called “a fiery, visceral tale” by the New York Times, praised by Pulitzer and National Book Award winners alike, and named a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. It earns every word of it.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Julian Zabalbeascoa grew up in Los Banos, California with deep roots in Bizkaia — spending summers in his father’s family village of Ibarranguelua, listening to his grandmother’s firsthand memories of the bombing of Gernika. Those stories became the seed of this novel. Today he’s a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he leads study abroad programs in San Sebastián, Madrid, and Havana. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is his debut. His second novel is already underway.
WHY IT MATTERS
The Basque people were among the first to fight fascism in the 20th century — and among the first to be abandoned by the world’s democracies. This book doesn’t let us forget that. As Zabalbeascoa himself puts it, the novel is about “shatterproof hope” — and right now, that’s exactly the kind of story we need.
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