What We Tried to Bury Grows Here

“Daring… In What We Tried to Bury Grows Here, almost two dozen narrators vie to convey the danger and uncertainty of life in a country where “tomorrow you never knew who would throw you against the wall for the actions of today.” We hear from priests and soldiers, mothers and children, prisoners and refugees. Amid the inevitable violence and horror, there are the equally inevitable heroes and villains, but for everyone the world has acquired ‘an evil stink.’ Mariana knows her compatriots have no choice but to fight on, yet she also knows that ‘the war will make us unrecognizable to our former selves.'”
—Alida Becker, The New York Times
“Zabalbeascoa’s characters cannot foresee the tragic end to the war, but readers do, and this chilling knowledge adds to the tension in this compelling and hauntingly prescient novel.”
—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature
“Zabalbeascoa brings together family lore and mountains of research to paint a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Spanish Civil War, particularly its impact on the people of Spain’s Basque region.”
—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“What We Tried to Bury Grows Here implores us to look back to history to not fall into passivity but instead take note of the perils of today. Zabalbeascoa structures his novel as a series of first-person vignettes, giving rise to a chorus of characters. It’s an imaginative and impressive feat of literary ventriloquism to hear from Basque soldiers. This structure allows Zabalbeascoa to comment on the collective nature of war while showing how it is an intensely personal undertaking. Through these characters, we are allowed to see slices of their war and how it builds to something more encompassing.”
—Brock Kingsley, Chicago Review of Books
“A stunning first novel, ambitious, intensely true, certain to be read for a long time. Zabalbeascoa is a phenomenon.”
—Philipp Meyer, author of The Son and American Rust
“Julian Zabalbeascoa is ferociously brilliant at rendering both the epic sweep of history—Franco’s rise to power, the Spanish Civil War—and the particular contours of daily life. The wineskins soldiers stash under their hospital mattresses. A bit of cake dipped in marmalade. The “metallic whistle” of a rifle shell. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a stunningly powerful novel about the individual acts of courage and violence that have shaped history as we know it. A virtuosic and unforgettable debut.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise
“What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a startling book, beautiful and horrific, that navigates the complexities of Basque Country during the Spanish Civil War, in which fascism and communism, regionalism and nationalism, and faith and skepticism do battle across a brilliantly evoked, suffering landscape.”
—Phil Klay, National Book Award winning author of Redeployment and Missionaries
“In the tradition of such master story tellers as Isaac Babel and Phil Klay, Julian Zabalbeascoa has written a piercing narrative set during the Spanish Civil War. Alive with wonderful characters, moments of dread, bathos and humour, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here illuminates a crucial period of history. This is a timely and absorbing novel.”
—Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field, Mercury, and The Flight of Gemma Hardy
“Julian Zabalbeascoa is the real deal, a major talent, and the story he’s telling here is both riveting and terrifying.”
—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls
“The rise of authoritarian rule is never an abstraction, it is always horrifically concrete for those who experience it. But as each bloody injustice fades into history, we run the risk of losing what we have learned that may have the power to forestall yet another such assault on democracy, which is just one reason why Julian Zabalbeascoa’s timely and deeply moving novel should be required reading for us all. Written with spare, evocative, and hypnotic prose, Zabalbeascoa takes us deeply into the lives of men and women – many of them of the Basque minority – who fought Franco and his allies during the Spanish Civil War. This is an important and necessary work of art for our fraught times, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.”
—Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, Gone So Long, and Townie: A Memoir
“Debut novelist Zabalbeascoa’s decision to tell his story through a plethora of individual narrators perfectly captures the messiness of a civil war… [What We Tried To Bury Grows Here] builds to an emotionally compelling climax.”
—Kirkus Reviews