AUTHOR’S NOTE

A long time ago, I came across an article about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade - American workers and students who volunteered in the last years of the 1930s to fight for the democratically elected Spanish Republic which was under attack from the Spanish army supported by Hitler and Mussolini. Thousands of them crossed the ocean without any previous experience of soldiering and risked their lives to fight for their ideals; many never came back. I was astonished by their courage and thought that their story would make a wonderful subject for a novel, particularly as no one seemed to have ever written one before.

Years went by and in 2016 I finished No Man’s Land, set before and during the First World War, and began to cast around for a subject for my next book. I had emigrated to the States eight years before and knew that I wanted to honor my adopted country by writing for the first time from an American perspective, trying to bring some part of its history to dramatic life. I remembered the Lincolns.

I soon discovered that more than thirty of the volunteers had written accounts of their experiences after they returned home defeated. The books were now long out of print, but I was able to order them through the mail and I read them all avidly, hoping to find out who these young men were and what made them tick. I learned that most but not all were Communists, that many were Jews determined to try to stop Hitler, and that some were African Americans who fought in Spain because they couldn’t fight in Ethiopia, where Mussolini had committed the most appalling atrocities in his unprovoked invasion of that poor country a year earlier, bombing peasants with canisters of poison gas. The Lincoln Brigade was the first racially integrated battalion in American history and the first to be commanded by a Black man.

The volunteers came from all walks of American life - university graduates and mill hands, teachers and truck drivers, even a governor’s son - but they were all united by a burning desire for justice. Not an abstract notion but a visceral outrage that the Fascists were trying to take away the democratic rights of the Spanish people who had voted to escape from under the yoke of centuries-old poverty and ignorance. The volunteers’ idealism and suffering moved me, and I wanted them to no longer be forgotten on the dusty shelves of book depositories, but instead to try to use my skills as a novelist to make their extraordinary experience come alive for readers today.

So I began a journey that lasted more than seven years - far longer than I had anticipated when I first set out! But necessary because I soon came to realize that I could not tell the story of the Lincolns without painting the wider canvas of the thirties - a decade of idealism and cynicism, hope and defeat, illusion and disillusion, that ended in the horrors of the Second World War. I knew that I needed to portray both the divided American society that the Lincolns came from, savaged by conflict between the haves and the have-nots suffering through the Great Depression, and the world of rural Spain, unchanged since medieval times, where beneath its beautiful surface and ancient customs, the landless braceros suffered from the most terrible poverty and degradation.

Most challenging of all, I set myself to bring to life the Spanish Civil War - a cruel conflict of competing ideologies in which no quarter was given and the great hope of the Spanish Republicans, and the volunteers who crossed the ocean to fight beside them, was finally extinguished in a tragic defeat that left Spain marooned in a Fascist darkness that lasted for thirty-six long years until General Franco died in 1975. Novelists since Hemingway have been scared off by the tangled complexities of the war and have left its history to the dry pens of the historians, but I think this has been a great mistake. The war was a dramatic, multifaceted conflict with immense human interest that formed the gateway to the Second World War. Understanding the one is key to understanding the other, and I hope that my novels will appeal to the many readers who continue to be fascinated by that extraordinary period of our shared history.

I have tried throughout to tell a fast-paced, panoramic story, rich in character, that brings the vanished worlds of America, England, and Spain in the 1930s to life - an era that has multiple resonances with the troubled world we live in today, where there is the same extreme wealth inequality, the same longing for social justice, and the same rise of totalitarianism abroad. Now, once again, the Western democracies face the challenge of a Fascist power launching a barbaric war of aggression and must decide whether to go down the road of appeasement or resistance. Now, more than ever, is the time for us to learn from our history.