by Nick Lloyd
First published 2026
Nick Lloyd sets out from Barcelona to understand how Spain remembers its civil war. He drives through Catalonia and Aragón, regions that held out longest against Franco's forces. At battle sites and memorials, he meets historians digging up local stories and descendants of Republican soldiers. In one village, he discovers the story of Francesc Boix, a photographer who lived near Lloyd's own home before fighting on the Catalan front and later testifying at Nuremberg. A journalist in Huesca shows him unmarked graves. In the ruins of Belchite, Lloyd walks streets where brutal combat once raged. At the French border, he follows the path of refugees who escaped fascism only to face imprisonment in concentration camps. Throughout his travels, Lloyd finds a country still divided over how to remember its past. Some want to uncover buried truths while others prefer silence. His journey reveals how the war's violence still marks Spain's landscape and politics, decades after the fighting ended.
Genres: history, 20th-century, non-fiction, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: investigative-journalism, personal-journey
Setting: Barcelona, Catalonia, Aragon, Huesca, Belchite, France
Period: Spanish Civil War, Nuremberg Trials
352 pages · Paperback · Hurst