The War That Has No Name

Spain has fought itself before.

The first time, the world watched and drew lessons. Poets wrote about it. Painters captured it. Philosophers argued over what it meant. By the time it ended, nearly a million Spaniards were dead, and the country that emerged from the rubble spent forty years pretending the war had never happened.

The second time, no one was watching. Or rather, everyone was watching, and no one was doing anything about it.

This is not a book about who started it, or who was right, or which side history will vindicate. History is still being written, and the people writing it have their own interests to protect.

This is a book about what happens inside a war, not above it, not around it, but inside it. In the streets where soldiers make decisions in seconds that they will spend the rest of their lives living with. In the workshops where ordinary people enable extraordinary violence and have to find a way to sleep at night. In the cockpits and the submarines and the hallways where men and women discover what they are actually made of when everything they were told to believe has collapsed around them.

The Spain in these pages is fictional. The moral weight of civil war is not.

Twenty stories. Twenty voices. One country tearing itself apart while the world counts its profits.