"The best history book at the year"-Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Times Literary Supplement (UK)."A masterpiece of twenty-first-century European Literature."--Jordi Gracia, El Pais.In February 1981, Spain, still emerging from Franco's shadow, was in the process of electing a new prime minister. On the day of the vote in Parliament, while the session was being filmed by TV cameras, a band of right-wing soldiers burst in with automatic weapons, ordering everyone down. Only three men defied the order. For thirty-five minutes, as bullets flew and cameras rolled, they stayed in their seats.Javier Cercas originally set out to write a work of fiction about this pivotal event but determined it had already gained an air of myth, or, through the annual broadcast of video clips, had at least acquire the fictional taint of reality television. Instead, Cercas employs vivid descriptions of that archival footage to frame a true narrative of the attempted coup, which he comes to understand as a last gasp of the bloody civil war four decades earlier.Traversing the line between history and art, Cercas creates an incisive literary inquest into national myth, personal memory, political spectacle, and reality itself. His account of a watershed modent in Spain's history is a contemporary masterpiece of Spanish literature."With this noval, Javier Cercas takes his place in the select group at the forefront of Spanish literature."-Roberto Bolano."A masterly parable of political violence, of suffering, but also, and decisively, of the strange locic of compassion and healing ... [Soldiers of Salamis] should become a classic."-George Steiner."This book is magnificent ... One of the best I've read in a long time."-Mario Vargas Llosa, El Pais --Book Jacket.