SPAIN, 1811. THE REGULAR ARMIES HAVE FAILED. THE PEOPLE ARE SPAIN’S ONLY HOPE.
Gabriel Araceli rides into the ruined Alcarria to find a countryside stripped bare — burned villages, empty granaries, women digging the fields with hoes, Frenchmen hanging in the trees. Here the war is fought by bands of irregulars: hungry, improvised, ferociously effective. At their head is Don Juan Martín, called el Empecinado, an illiterate farmer who cannot spell his own dispatches and cannot be beaten in the field.
Beside him rides Mosén Antón Trijueque, a giant of an Aragonese priest in a ruined cassock, a tactician of genius and a man eaten alive by envy of the leader he serves. What begins as resentment becomes conspiracy, and conspiracy becomes an ambush in the snow that leaves Gabriel a prisoner of the French, condemned to be shot, alone in a cell with an orphaned child the guerrilleros have adopted as their own.
What follows is escape, pursuit, a night crossing of the frozen sierra, and a reckoning between two enemies that only Galdós could write.
Juan Martín el Empecinado is the ninth book of the Episodios Nacionales, Benito Pérez Galdós’s forty-six-novel account of Spain’s nineteenth century, a sequence long recognised as one of the great achievements of European fiction, and unavailable to English readers for over 150 years.
The ebooks have already been sent to the paid subscribers. Translated by Vox Day, Juan Martín el Empecinado is now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.