Meet Julian Zabalbeascoa Author of What We Tried to Bury Grows Here

This event is free to attend. Seating is first come, first served.

Meet the author, find out about a terrific new book, ask questions and hear directly from the author, and get personalized signed books!

Bookshop West Portal is excited to partner with the Basque Cultural Center to bring you an evening with Julian Zabalbeascoa to celebrate his first novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here.

You don't need to have read the book to enjoy the event! We do recommend reserving your copy ahead of time:

A masterly crafted and haunting tale of survival, longing, and empathy, set during the Spanish Civil War.

In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain, spurred to join the fight to preserve his country's democracy from the insurrectionists by the rousing words of a political essayist. Months earlier, Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain's newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup, but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.

In Bilbao, Mariana raises her two young children while, with her writing, she decries the fascist-backed coup attempt and their German and Italian allies, imploring the world to support democracy. As the Nationalist forces assault the country, Mariana and Isidro's lives intersect fleetingly, yet in meaningful and lasting ways.

Through a chorus of voices--a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her in order to fight against the fascists, among others--we follow Isidro and Mariana as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart.

Julian Zabalbeascoa is a fierce and assured new talent, and What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a remarkable feat of research and imagination, as well as a transcendent literary accomplishment. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Ploughshares, among other journals. He divides his time between Boston and the Basque Country in Spain. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is his first novel.

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