Backstory English Bookshop - Events

A casual (but coordinated) coffee break to meet new friends, take a Zoom break, and get your AM caffeine fix.

Stop by for a few minutes or stay the whole time. Bring a friend or wander in solo. Come for the coffee and company, or just bring a book to read while surrounded by other in-real-life, community-seeking humans. Come by every Friday, or just when you happen to be in town. Make it whatever you need it to be that week. It's not an *event* per se, but we hope these Friday meet-ups can become a fixture of the bookshop!

Gathering spot will be in the downstairs area of the bookshop (near the Community Library). Coffee and tea are 1.50€ and can be purchased at the cash register upstairs. Find more info on our Instagram (@backstorybookshop) or website (www.backstorybookshop.com).

We are delighted to welcome Julian Zabalbeascoa for the European launch of What We Tried to Bury Grows Here, "a fiery, visceral tale of the Spanish Civil War," according to the New York Times, and a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Zabalbeascoa will be in conversation with Nick Lloyd, author of Travels through the Spanish Civil War. Together, they will reflect on the Spanish Civil War, its origins and consequences, and the war's deep resonances today, in Spain and throughout the world.

This promises to be a rich and wide-ranging conversation, followed by an audience Q&A and a book signing.

## About the Speakers:

Julian Zabalbeascoa is the debut author of What We Tried to Bury Grows Here. Among other journals, his short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Gettysburg Review, One Story, and Ploughshares. He is a dual citizen of Spain and the United States, earned his MFA in Creative Writing in Madrid, and teaches in the Honors College at UMass Lowell, where he leads annual study abroad programs to San Sebastian, Havana, Madrid, and Paris.

Nick Lloyd is a writer, historian, and founder of Spanish Civil War Tours, a project dedicated to bringing the stories of the conflict to life through guided visits to key sites across Catalonia and Aragón. Over the years, his work has helped connect countless visitors with Spain’s complex past, weaving together the political, cultural, and personal dimensions of the war. Travels Through the Spanish Civil War is his latest work—a deeply human account of memory, movement, and meaning in the landscapes of twentieth-century Spain.

About the book:
In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain, spurred to join the fight to preserve his country’s democracy from the insurrectionists by the rousing words of a political essayist. Months earlier, Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain’s newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup, but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.

In Bilbao, Mariana raises her two young children while, with her writing, she decries the fascist-backed coup attempt and their German and Italian allies, imploring the world to support democracy. As the Nationalist forces assault the country, Mariana and Isidro’s lives intersect fleetingly, yet in meaningful and lasting ways.

Through a chorus of voices—a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her in order to fight against the fascists, among others—we follow Isidro and Mariana as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart.