Winter in Madrid

Book Title         : Winter in Madrid
Author               : C J Sansom
Year Published  : 2006
Date I Read      : 12 March 2012
My Rating         : 7/10

I was all packed for my long flight to India from London - book selected a long time ago. When I was checking in, the airlines offered to send one of our cabin along with the checkin so that we need not carry all the stuff along with our little one. As luck would have it, I missed taking my book out. I was waiting at the gate. It was one of the far away gates. After passing all the shops and most gates, there was a tunnel which was the way to the last 5 gates. It took us around 15 min to get there. Since I had time, I decided to run back to the shop and pick myself a book. This is what I ended up with. Reason - it looked interesting and it was on sale :-)

Did I tell you before - I never read a review of a book or a movie. Knowing parts of it makes me not interested in it. Sometimes, the backcover of the book tells most of the story. So I did not really know what I was buying.

Another lesson that I have learnt before is never to start reading a book in a train or plane. I always read atleast 50 pages before I board. As you can see I had no choice today. So I just could not read it. I knew I had wasted my money on this one. Anyways, I was out of book at home again. How I miss my home :-( I decided to give this a shot again. I am glad I did.

Theme

This is set in Spain (as the title indicates) post the civil war (1936) during the second world war. It is the story of Englishman (ex military) Harry Brett who is to work as a spy in Spain. His task is to spy on an old school mate Sandy Forsyth. Sandy's girlfriend, Barbara Clare is trying to find out about her ex-boyfriend Bernie Piper. Harry, Sandy and Bernie were together in a public school as kids.

What I thought about the book

It is a well written book. A little understanding of Spain's history will help in reading the book. I did not have a clue, but I picked it up from the book as I read along. It has heartbreaking description of the war, the prison, torture, the orphaned kids, religion, communism. fascism.

Would recommend the book


Related links

Winter in Madrid in Wikipedia


Challenges

Linking this to letter W for A to Z by Title