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Joseph

Julian Rathbone

0

awards won

4

score

#2856 of 8,085 books · #426 in Historical Fiction

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1979).

Spain - 1808 to 1813 - where Revolution collides with Reaction, a British Army with a French; the Spain of Goya, where ignorant armies clash and from under them all comes the voice of Joseph: by birth European, by education enlightened, and living in Salamanca which suffered a new invasion every six months and saw one of Wellington's greatest battles. From the moment in early childhood when Joseph hurls a stone at a playmate and makes an evil enemy for life, to the last page when he climbs a hill in North Spain accompanied by a donkey, a giantess, and a new-born babe, and blunders into a battle, he takes the reader by the elbow and hurries him 'will he or will he not' across the terrible years that saw the birth of our own times. Racy, picaresque, but with an underlying seriousness, JOSEPH is a panoramic novel of the Spanish Penisular War, revealing as Goya did its grotesqueries and ironies as well as its horrifying waste of life.

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Publisher
Michael Joseph
ISBN-13
9780349112275
Topics
Napoleonic Wars/Peninsular WarComing of ageWar and its absurdities

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