COLUMNISTA, EL

Keith Scott-Watson had been shot by the Germans in Egypt, or so the author's family had told him since childhood. After Aunt Nieves's death, a strange letter dated 1948 was found among her belongings, in which he accused her of cheating on him with four different lovers since they met in Bilbao, following the bombing of Guernica, and they had embarked on a whirlwind odyssey through a world in flames. How much of it was true? Who were they? This is the true story of a popular British journalist who enlisted in the International Column at the start of the Spanish Civil War and a young communist woman who worked for the Basque Government--and with it, the story of all those who made up the star-studded cast of a life as cinematic as theirs. Did Keith, ever the dreamer, want to write his own script? Having fled to France, reality--more raw and evocative than any fiction--leads them to Germany, the old Free City of Danzig, Rome, Athens, Cairo, and Jerusalem; they encounter spies, soldiers, adventurers, novelists, poets, and, amid the world war and the Palestinian Nakba, witness their tragedy unfold: a little boy, a psychiatric hospital... Nieves Fernández forged ties with García Lorca, extolled La Pasionaria, and also prayed fervently to Christ. Her husband was an assistant to Sefton Delmer, paid intriguing visits to Queipo de Llano, and declared himself as pro-Nazi as Churchill. A thrilling search through records, archives, and libraries in various countries has made possible the telling of this tumultuous and unprecedented biography of love, lies, and weapons.