The Road to Zarauz

The Perseids brought it all out of the past, with a force like a blowthat leaves you winded. The night lurched and seemed to swoopsuddenly down. The boy still lay on his back, but when I sat up,gasping, I glimpsed the pale disc of his face as he turned to see whathad startled me.'It's all right,' I said, though it wasn't.It is the summer of 1954. Four young men, on a summer vacation buyan old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all theway to the mountains of Spain. It is only a few years since the war,Europe is still in ruins. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamersand realists, men but not much more than boys. They have their wholelives ahead of them. This will be their summer to remember.A beautiful, elegiac rumination on youth, friendship and the dreamsthat we hold."A haunting meditation on memory and loss that takes the readeron a summer road trip to a vanished Spain. In this well-crafted,wistful novella, Sam Adams weaves his tapestry from fragments ofa remembered friendship in a coming of age tale written with sixtyyears' bitter hindsight." - Richard GwynSam Adams has created a rare novel in The Road to Zarauz, bothtimeless and very much of a time and a place, a past of hope andexpectation erased in a moment, and what remains when hope is gone.