In the night of time - Antonio Muoz Molina

October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer's son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever alters his life.A rich, panoramic portrait of Spain on the brink of civil war, In the Night of Time details the passions and tragedies of a country tearing itself apart. Compared in scope and importance to War and Peace, Muoz Molina's masterpiece is the great epic of the Spanish Civil War written by one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists.

Antonio Muoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including In the Night of Time (also published by Tuskar Rock), Sepharad, and A Manuscript of Ashes. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including Spain's National Narrative Prize, the Planeta Prize, and the Prncipe de Asturias Prize. He lives in Madrid and New York City.

An immense, luminous panorama of the Spanish Civil War ... one of the many wonders of this novel is how Molina integrates the personal so closely with the political ... in the fine tradition of novels of everything, reaching back to Cervantes by way of Bellow and Hemingway ... He brings an encyclopedic knowledge of the times to bear in a way that never drags on the narrative ... In a novel so concerned with the flow of memory and time, it seems fitting that the final chapters are set on the banks of the Hudson River, where Ignacio has been commissioned to design a library. This novel feels as vast as a library, and as compellingly seductive as a river
Independent - Gerard Woodward

exhilarating...exceptional... This is a necessary novel. Edith Grossman's translation compellingly captures its depiction of the ugliness of war and the remorselessness of human memory when many in Spain, nearly eight decades on, would like to consign the civil war to oblivion.
Financial Times - Adam Feinstein

Sweeping, magisterial ... an astonishingly vivid narrative that unfolds with hypnotic intensity by means of the constant interweaving of time and memory ... Tolstoyan in its scale, emotional intensity and intellectual honesty.
Economist

An epic...Molina's cogent examination of war on a scale both large and small reaffirms his place as a giant of Europe's literary scene, well-worth being discovered by American readers
The Daily Beast

Spellbinding ... what distinguishes In the Night of Time - what makes it eye-openingly new - is its meticulous reconstruction of Spain in 1936, its attention to detail, its fusion of history and imagination, its tension between love's surrender and war's stiff resolve. Let me put it this way: Antonio Muoz Molina's novel is one of the most eloquent monuments to the Spanish Civil War ever to be raised in fiction.
Washington Post

What is remarkable about the book...is how much Munoz Molina manages to say about the world itself and how hypnotic his narrative becomes as he slows down time...Munoz Molina offers a force and a rare pity to the documentary evidence by his skill at orchestrating, playing tones and rhythms against each other...he approaches character with even greater tenderness, allowing for every type of weakness
New York Review of Books

Superb...A simple love story at one level, a broad portrait of a nation in flames at another, and a masterwork through and through
Kirkus (starred review)

Epic...In the Night of Time gives its subject the space it deserves and renders it vibrantly with intoxicating prose.
Entertainment Weekly

A War and Peace for the Spanish Civil War
Publishers Weekly

A large rough-cut gem of a story that lingers in one's mind. [Molina] appears to be finally getting the international attention he deserves
Booklist (starred review)