Javier Cercas’s last book, The Impostor (2017)...is one of the most accomplished books I’ve ever read. His new novel is even better. It opens with an agonised liberal facing up to an embarrassing family past, and ends as a wise and humane meditation on history.

... [a] brave political and family history.

... finely translated.

Cercas’s 'nonfiction novel,' first published in Spanish in 2017, presents an altogether more unsettling challenge for politically correct readers — as it must have done for the author himself.

The novel is narrated by a character called Javier Cercas, a figure so self-deprecating and likable that the reader is immediately on his side.

Mr. Cercas tells a story...of reportage through which the dead walk with all the vibrancy of the living.

... even as he tracks his great-uncle to the north of Spain, Cercas never loses sight of their home town, a place whose hatreds and bloodletting become a microcosm of the madness engulfing the country.

... one of the strengths of Lord of All the Dead is the breadth of its subject matter. We learn enough about Mena to know the bare outline of his life and why he decided to fight for The Falange. But, more interestingly, we also discover the truth about why other Spaniards joined one side or another.

As in his earlier novel, Cercas is a slippery narrator, shifting in and out of the story, sometimes taking an overview with a documentary, almost forensic tone, at other times assuming the first person role of ‘Javier Cercas’ researching his family’s past — then pulling the rug from this conceit with post-modernist glee.

... a curious book.

In the end, he’s told the story to tell the story. He doesn’t say his (moral) story possesses merit, such as contributing to knowledge. He can’t say that. Legends can’t do that. Or so he believes, or thinks he believes.

Cercas’s candid wranglings with how to tell this tale, his own deep discomfort and the grave maturity with which he acknowledges he can’t feel morally superior to Mena make him a wonderfully warm and wise guide through this sad, small chapter of the Spanish Civil War.

Cercas began Lord of All the Dead with hopes to cull history from legend but found that establishing history’s granular facts is no easy task. Documents can be wrong, memories distorted; 'it was as difficult to trap the past as it was to trap water in your hands,' he writes. The novelist in him wanted to enter into Mena’s life, 'to smell exactly what he’d smelled and feel exactly what he’d felt.'.

... a book as much about Spain’s troubled history as its subject, a promising young man who never had the chance to find out who he was or what he stood for.

... a magnificent reconciliation.

...[a] cleverly crafted memoir.