Tell Me Who I Am

Book excerpt: A journalist receives a proposal to investigate the eventful life of his great-grandmother, about whom all that is known is that she fled Spain, abandoning her husband and child, shortly before the Civil War broke out. The memoir of an entire century, this novel adds a new, original chapter to Julia Navarro's best-selling career. Tell Me Who I Am surprises and enchants with a captivating and heartrending story. This is a novel about memory and identity with an exceptionallywell-drawn and unforgettable literary character: a woman who throughout her extraordinary life was able to achieve the highly difficult feat of knowing herself. A victim of her mistakes, aware of her guilt, frightened by her traumas, she is above all an anti-heroine, a flesh-and-blood woman who always acts according to her principles, facing up to every challenge and making errors for which she will never fully pay. A woman who decided that she couldn't be neutral in this life. Navarro's most personal novel surprises for its melodrama and the raw emotions transmitted by many of its stories. It is filled with pure adventure, introspection and political chronicle. From the tumultuous years of the Second Spanish Republic to the fall of the Berlin Wall, including World War II and the Cold War, these pages are packed with intrigue, emotion, politics, espionage, love, betrayal and settings like Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Moscow, London, Berlin and Warsaw with brief stopovers in The Basque Country, Cairo, Athens, Lisbon and New York.