For a Sack of Bones

By Lluís-Anton Baulenas

After eight years in exile, Sergeant Genis Aleu returns to the city of Barcelona bearing the mark of a man who has seen many battles - and who has one last mission ahead of him. As the people of Spain... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151012555
• ISBN13: 9780151012558
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Length: 359 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Gritty and compelling page-turner

Barcelona novelist Lluis-Anton Baulenas' For a Sack of Bones recently won Catalonia's highest literary award, the Ramon Llull prize, for this most satisfying read. The novel is a gripping and compelling page-turner than not only conveys vividly the tragedy of the Spanish civil war and the subsequent dictatorship, but also the moral quagmires which so many Spaniards and Catalans were forced to endure, often as a matter of simple survival. It is flabbergasting to think that Barcelona, arguably the most cutting edge city in the world today, was until the mid-1970s under the boot of a brutal dictatorship. As in France during World War II, there were oppressors and there were oppressed, but sometimes the line between the two was precariously thin. The main protagonist of For a Sack of Bones, Sergeant Genis Aleu, is in a moral grey zone, pursuing a quixotic mission to fulfill his father's dying wish. However, the road to achieving this goal threatens his own moral integrity, and even his life. In its review of the book, the Toronto Star (July 13, 2008) commented that 'Baulenas is an accomplished storyteller whose narrative never falters, never veers off-course, never relinquishes its hold on the reader'. Baulenas keeps the pressure mounting throughout the narrative, to a highly-charged conclusion ultimately reminiscent of Greek tragedy.