Blind Sunflowers

Blind Sunflowers

Albert Mendez's Blind Sunflowers (Arcadia Books) is a first book, a short book and one which its author spent a lifetime preparing. Its historically and thematically related episodes grieve over some dilemmas in the immediate aftermath of Spain's civil war. A pregnant Republican, on the run with her partner, dies giving birth; the father does his best to keep the infant and himself alive. Another fugitive tries to stay silent in a cupboard while he overhears his wife being sexually blackmailed by a monk who teaches at their son's school. Through a range of perspectives, Mendez - who grew up in Franco's Spain, was a student in Rome and Madrid in the early 1960s and became a publisher and TV presenter - explores the elusiveness of historical truth without capitulating to moral relativism. He died in 2004, the year in which Los girasoles ciegos was published to critical acclaim but with at first unspectacular sales. Word of mouth slowly pushed it into Spain's bestseller lists and it has spent the past seven months in the fiction top ten. Now it has been translated into English.

Jeremy Treglown