Outlaws

by Javier Cercas

Overview

On a summer day at the arcade, timid sixteen-year-old Ignacio Cañas encounters two charismatic rebels: El Zarco (“Blue Eyes”) and his gorgeous girl, Tere. Entranced, he crosses the border into their dangerous world, becoming their partner in crimes that quickly escalate.

Twenty-five years later, Tere materializes in Cañas's office, needing help. Cañas has settled back into middle-class life, becoming a successful defense lawyer. Zarco has matured into a convict of some infamy. Yet somehow, with new stakes, this three-way affair will begin again.

With his usual brio, Javier Cercas surveys the borders between right and wrong, respectability and criminality, and to what extent we can pass between them-or determine on which side we ultimately fall. This brilliantly plotted tale firmly establishes him as one of the most rewarding novelists writing today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620403266
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	08/12/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	575 KB

About the Author

Javier Cercas's books, including The Anatomy of a Moment and Soldiers of Salamis, have won numerous awards, sold more than a million copies worldwide, and been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in Barcelona.

Anne McLean is an acclaimed translator. Her translation of Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis won both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Valle Inclán award. She lives in Toronto.
Javier Cercas is a lecturer in Spanish Literature at the University of Gerona. Soldiers of Salamis has been published in fifteen languages.

Editorial Reviews

06/15/2014
In 1978 Gerona, Spain, 16-year-old Ignacio Cañas ("Gafitas") joins a delinquent gang headed by Zarco and his moll, Tere. After an armed bank robbery goes awry owing to a sting, the gang dissolves; Zarco is arrested, but the police mercifully if inexplicably release Cañas. Jumping ahead 20 years, Cañas is a successful lawyer when Tere suddenly appears and asks him to defend Zarco, now a notorious felon. Though Cañas manages to get him off, Zarco returns to a life of crime, and ultimately succumbs to AIDS. Meanwhile, Cañas carries on a clandestine affair with Tere, which culminates in startling revelations, eventually cast in doubt, about her relationship with Zarco and the robbery tip-off. Using the device of investigative inquiry, as in previous novels (Soldiers of Salamis; The Speed of Time), the story alternates between the Cercas's interviewing Cañas and the police inspector in the book's first part and the prison superintendent in the second. VERDICT In this fast-paced, twisting, fluidly translated work (though some British slang may be unfamiliar), Cercas brilliantly portrays the almost mythic proportions of Zarco, inspired by a real-life Spanish Robin Hood, as well as the generation of outlaws in transitional Spain.—Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

Library Journal

A persuasive, brilliant and absorbing book that has more contemporary resonance than even he might have imagined.” —The Economist, on The Anatomy of a Moment

“A haunting and provocative book about history, memory, and the elusive nature of heroism . . . Funny, moving, and surprising.” —The Washington Post, on Soldiers of Salamis

“Conjuring up lost people and places in a style at once personal, idiosyncratic and slyly circuitous . . . fostering a seductive and even moving sense of immediacy . . . Cercas demonstrates . . . that history demands emotional engagement.” —The New York Times, on The Speed of Light

From the Publisher