A Year on a Spanish Mountain

Sacred Sierra

Jason Webster had lived in Spain for 15 years when he and his partner Salud, a flamenco dancer, tired of their city life and decided to buy a crumbling farmhouse clinging to the side of a steep valley in the eastern province of Castellón. He knew nothing about farming - he didn't even know what an almond tree looked like, or that he owned over 100 of them - but with help from local farmers and a twelfth-century book on gardening he set about recreating his dream. 
 
Sacred Sierra tells the story of their first year on the mountain, and how they cleared the land, planted and harvested olives, nurtured precious, expensive truffles, all while surviving gale force winds and scorching summer fires. While toying with the timeless, he also retells ancient legends and as the year passed, finds himself increasingly in tune with the ancient, mystical life of the sierra, a place that will haunt your imagination and raise your spirits.

Brilliant, funny, powerfully evocative - the young English author of Duende! and his Spanish wife set out to create a magical garden high in remote Spanish mountains.

Webster has the endearing writer's knack of making us laugh and weep along with him...written in the sympathetic tradition of Chris Stewart's best-selling Driving Over Lemons, but is even better

Discursive and appealingly conversational...an inspiring account

Webster is a clever, hugely readable interpreter of Spain. He is also irrepressible: his work is a master class in involvement...this deserves to be - and undoubtedly will be - one of the most successful books about Spain this year

Full of romanticism, comedy mishaps and colourful characters, it makes for a deeply personal and highly personable account of one life-changing year

Brought up in England, Jason Webster has lived for many years in Spain. His acclaimed non-fiction books about Spain include Duende: A Journey in Search of Flamenco; Andalus: Unlocking the Secrets of Moorish Spain; Guerra: Living in the Shadows of the Spanish Civil War; Sacred Sierra: A Year on a Spanish Mountain and The Spy with 29 Names. His Max Cámara series of crime novels started with Or the Bull Kills You, which was was longlisted for the CWA Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards New Blood Dagger 2011. This was followed by A Death in Valencia, The Anarchist Detective, Blood Med and A Body in Barcelona.

Guerra

After twelve years in Spain, Jason Webster had developed a deep love for his adopted homeland; his life there seemed complete. But when he and his Spanish wife moved into an idyllic old farmhouse in the mountains north of Valencia, by chance he found an unmarked mass grave from the Spanish Civil War on his doorstep.Spurred to investigate the history of the Civil War, a topic many of his Spanish friends still seemed to treat as taboo, he began to uncover a darker side to the country. Witness to a brutal fist-fight sponsored by remnants of Franco's Falangists, arrested and threatened by the police in the former HQ of the Spanish Foreign Legion, sheltered by a beautiful transvestite, shunned by locals, haunted by ghosts and finally robbed of his identity, Webster encountered a legacy of cruelty and violence that seems to linger on seventy years after the bloody events of that war. 
 
As in Webster's previous books, Duende and Andalus, ¡Guerra! reveals the essence of modern Spain, which few outsiders ever manage to see. Fascinating true stories from the Civil War, vividly retold as he travels around the country. Yet the more Webster unveils of the passions that set one countryman against another, the more he is led to wonder: could the dark, primitive currents that ripped the country apartin the 1930s still be stirring under the sophisticated, worldly surface of today's Spain?

Completing his edgy Spanish trilogy, Jason Webster unearths the secrets of the Spanish Civil War, and turns it into a personal quest for its dark legacy in today's Spain.

An absorbing book that conveys the raw Spanish experience - its heat, dust, light and shade - with rare and startling actuality. Admirers of his first two books will have their high regard confirmed by this one. Newcomers should start here. They will not be disappointed

Written with considerable power and beauty

The term "romantic traveller", once used indiscriminately by Spaniards to describe any foreigner with a passionate interest in Spain, seems particularly applicable to Jason Webster... you are likely to be seduced by his powers as a storyteller

Squarely in the Almodovarian reality of contemporary Spain... goes straight to the heart

Webster's surely right to see the legacy of the war in terms of - often turbulent - undercurrents; for him it informs a little-known and largely nasty side of Spain... revelatory and rings true

The book's raison d'etre are stories taken from his current surroundings that say something about Spain's ambivalent, deliberately amnesiac relationship with its past, and about ways in which that past continues today... shows that the Spanish Civil War is not only still imaginatively powerful but has lost none of its hold on foreigners

Proves himself a writer of true talent,stripping away the myth to reveal the bloody conflict for what it was... brilliantly evokes modern Spain, a shimmering haze of edginess and discontentment which beats down like the noonday sun, and he proves that the dark undercurrents of 70 years ago are still in evidence today

There are many... dirty deeds recorded but, partly because of Webster's essentially happy character, his heartfelt prose and his deep love for modern Spain and its vibrant people, this positive and optimistic book leaves an impression of hope after the horror

Perhaps only a foreigner, and a foreigner who lives in Spain, could give a truly accurate picture of how the memory of the Civil War still dominates so many people's lives in the country. In all its glare and gloom, this is what Jason Webster's vivid and perceptive journey through the tortured memory of modern Spain provides

It's great! Negotiates that difficult territory between being an outsider and a native and manages to take the reader along for the voyage... a fine and compelling book

Thad Carhart, author of THE PIANO SHOP ON THE LEFT BANK

A Journey In Search Of Flamenco

Duende

Having pursued a conventional enough path through school and university, Jason Webster was all set to enter the world of academe as a profession. But when his aloof Florentine girlfriend of some years dumped him unceremoniously, he found himself at a crossroads. Abandoning the world of libraries and the future he had always imagined for himself, he headed off instead for Spain in search of duende, the intense emotional state - part ecstasy, part desperation - so intrinsic to flamenco. 
 
Duende is an account of his years spent in Spain feeding his obsessive interest in flamenco: he subjects himself to the tyranny of his guitar teacher, practising for hours on end until his fingers bleed; he becomes involved in a passionate affair with Lola, a flamenco dancer (and older woman) married to the gun-toting Vicente, only to flee Alicante in fear of his life; in Madrid, he falls in with Gypsies and meets the imperious Jesús. Joining their dislocated, cocaine-fuelled world, stealing cars by night and sleeping away the days in tawdry rooms, he finds himself spiralling self-destructively downwards. It is only when he arrives in Granada bruised and battered, after two years total immersion in the flamenco lifestyle that he is able to put his obsession into context. 
 
In the tradition of Laurie Lee's classic As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Duende charts a young man's emotional coming of age and offers real insight into the passionate essence of flamenco.

Part travelogue, part picaresque adventures of a young man, DUENDE takes the reader to the emotional heart of Spain.

The autobiography-as-travelogue that is also a rite of passage is a form which worked brilliantly for Laurie Lee and Bruce Chatwin - both novelists as well as seekers after the truth-behind-the-truth. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new star of the genre: Jason Webster

His descriptions of troubled modern day Spain are mesmerising, but the greater curiosity is in seeing just how much trouble the confused innocent can create for himself before finding out whom he might really be

Wonderfully told, with enough detail about flamenco to educate the curious, and enough drama and characters to fill a novel, Webster may not have turned out to be a guitar maestro, but his journey is recounted like a master

Duende is an intensely personal portrait of a country in the throes of modernisation, whose spirit still defies definition

One of the best books ever written about Spain

A powerful, dangerous book that should win many prizes

I found his descriptions of the Flamenco underworld irresistible... I couldn't put it down

Chris Stewart, author of Driving Over Lemons

An impressive debut... Duende sweeps along from one harmonious chord to the next and builds into a crescendo that is as rich in atmosphere and emotion as the world it seeks to portray... What it does most successfully is describe a young man's rite of passage through a foreign culture, a journey from which he emerges with a greater understanding of his subject and considerably wiser about the nature of human relationships. We sill be lucky if we see many such passionate and evocative travel books this year

Fascinating... The best travel writing is not about topography but people, and Webster's infiltration of this notoriously closed community makes for compulsive reading... Webster is an exceptional writer, and this is a great book

Jason Webster may have started out by hoping that flamenco would provide him with a means of creative expression, but by the end it very much looks as if he has found his true voice as a writer

Jason Webster portrays the sheer anarchy and passion of the place as convincingly as any of his more illustrious predecessors

Highly entertaining... Music, passion, drugs, 'a beakerful of the warm South' - who could resist all that in these dark days?

The traditions of the Bildungsroman and the rites-of-passage novel have migrated into the travel genre

Jason Webster

Unlocking The Secrets Of Moorish Spain

As Islam and the West prepare to clash once again, Jason Webster embarks on a quest to discover Spain's hidden Moorish legacy and lift the lid on a country once forged by both Muslims and Christians. He meets Zine, a young illegal immigrant from Morocco, a twenty-first century Moor, lured over with the promise of a job but exploited as a slave labourer on a fruit farm. Jason's life is threatened as he investigates the agricultural gulag, Zine rescues him, and the unlikely pair of writer and desperado take off on a rollercoaster ride through Andalucía. 
 
While Jason unveils the neglected Arab ancestry of modern Spain - apparent in its food, language, people and culture - Zine sets out on his own parallel quest, a one-man peace mission to resolve Muslim-Christian tensions by proving irresistible to Spanish señoritas.

Jason Webster

Andalus

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