They come to run, to remind themselves they are alive, to exorcize the demons of the past twelve months, to show off, get laid, get drunk, play pranks, join the dance.... Each July where the old pilgrim road to Santiago descends from the Pyrenees, the Navarran town of Pamplona explodes into a nine-day fiesta unlike any other on earth. Yearly, hordes of unlikely characters from all corners of the globe dream of their rendezvous with San Fermin and its rite of encierro: eight mornings of running the fighting bulls of Spain. A saga of great energy, color and sweep, SanFermin 1 (the first of a trilogy) sets the legendary fiesta made famous by Hemingway at the heart of a vast canvas ranging over world events across forty years and many countries. Through the eyes of a Tolstoyan cast of oilmen, philosophers, spies, lawyers, veterans, artists, reporters, flyboys, aid workers, backpackers and millionaires, the reader is drawn into an exhilarating and unpredictable world of quixotic personalities, mavericks and cockeyed oddballs from everywhere, all the lost boys of summer and their ladies chasing the mortal dream of passion, danger and fiesta - that heady drug unique to Spain. This novel is their story. An epic of intertwined fortunes, friendships, romances and rivalries stretching over continents and generations from Nam to 9/11 and beyond. 1001 days and nights of tales, sacred and profane, woven into the tapestry of a place where people waltz with giants, race in company with primeval beasts and hunt the elusive spoor of Hemingway's ghost and all the others who danced in these eternal streets.
