This reworked and streamlined version of Goytisolo's 1975 novel spins the reader through an angry, prickly catalogue of Spanish colonialism and slavery.

An exile returns to Spain from France to find that he is repelled by the fascism of Franco's Spain and drawn to the world of Muslim culture. In Marks of Identity, Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, speaks for a generation of Spaniards who were small children during the Spanish Civil War, grew up under a stifling dictatorship, and, in many cases, emigrated in desperation from their dying country. Upon his return, the narrator confronts the most controversial political, religious, social, and sexual issues of our time with ferocious energy and elegant prose. Torn between the Islamic and European worlds around him, he finds both ultimately unsatisfactory. In the end, only displacement survives.

New edition of first volume of Goytisolo's great trilogy.

A novel of England during the Viking era, from an author who “has vividly and colorfully portrayed life during the tumultuous Dark Ages” (Historical Novels Review). The last quarter of the tenth century was a time of conflict and exploration—while the Anglo-Saxons fought against the Vikings, Norsemen voyaged into the unknown looking for new lands to pillage, and so discovered America. Prince Rumon of France, descendant of Charlemagne and King Alfred, was a searcher. He had visions of the Islands of the Blessed, perhaps King Arthur’s Avalon, “where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.” Merewyn grew up in savage Cornwall—a lonely girl, sustained by stubborn courage and belief in her descent from great King Arthur. Chance—or fate—in the form of a shipwreck off the Cornish coast brought Rumon and Merewyn together, and from that hour their lives were intertwined. Bound by his vow to her dying mother, Rumon brings Merewyn safely to England, keeping hidden the shameful secret of her birth. He considers his responsibility ended. At court, he is dazzled by the beautiful Queen Alfrida—but when a murderous truth is revealed, he turns to Merewyn, only to discover that he may have lost her. And he will journey across the Atlantic to find her again . . . From the beloved bestselling author of Katherine and Dragonwyck, this is a romantic tale of history and adventure “characterized by an authentic sense of time” (The New York Times Book Review).

An intimate account of travel in Andalusia during the 1950s, Juan Goytisolo's early, short narrative grimly revisits the province of Almería, still under Franco's rule. The critic Ramón Fernández Palmeral writes: "More than a mere travelog, Goytisolo bravely chose to report the social and economic life in the Almería of those Franquista years." He adds: "Brave, most of all, because by publishing it, even at first in France, Goytisolo risked being sent to jail." --

For Goytisolo, great writers are 'solitary birds' whose voice is an enchanting cry that pierces time.On his hospital bed, the persecuted narrator identifies with St John of the Cross, himself forced by the Inquisition to swallow his Treatise on the Qualities of the Solitary Bird. Through the scintillating successions of visions, soliloquies and ecstatic chants he converses with the banished saints. The agencies of repression have changed but, as in the past, a hideous revenge will be wrought on the heretic whose work is seen to be as deadly a contamination as AIDS. Four hundred years ago, St John creatively ransacked in his writing the cultures of Christianity, biblical Judaism and Muslim mysticism. Juan Goytisolo now pays rich homage, with atonal dissonance and constant invention.