The Wrong Blood

In the Basque Country in northern Spain, just before the Civil War, three men in dinner suits stop for a drink at a bar before continuing on their way to a wedding. Their trip is interrupted when their leader, thewealthy Don Leopoldo, has a stroke in the restroom.This event, bizarre and undignified though it is, begins to weave together the lives of two remarkable women: the bride, the beautiful and distinguished Isabel Cruces, andMaria Antonia Etxarri, the bar owner's adolescent daughter. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Maria Antonia is raped and Isabel's newlywed husband, Captain Julen Herraiz, isshot. Both women find themselves violently altered, alone, and pregnant. A crippled but wise local doctor is the only witness to the mysterious, silent agreement these women conclude in the loneliness and desperation oftheir mutual suffering. Many years later, a young student, grandson to Isabel, returns to the scene of the events to spend an innocent summer studying for law exams. As he goes about his work, he unwittingly awakens theghosts haunting both Maria Antonia and the doctor, and through their memories the passionate stories of the past unfurl before the reader.

De Lope brilliantly reveals hisincredible story through flashes of memory and emotion, told in a winding torrent that expresses the cumulative nature of both history and nostalgia.

In the Basque Country in Spain, just before the Civil War, three men stop for a drink at a bar before continuing on their way to a wedding. Their trip is interrupted when their leader has a stroke. This event weaves together the lives of two remarkable women.

Manuel de Lope was born in Burgos, Spain in 1949. At age fifteen he moved to

Madrid where he now resides again, after having lived in Geneva, London, and the South of France for twenty-five years. In 1978 he published his first novel, Albertina en el país de los Garamantes, thus commencing one of the most treasured and significant careers in modern Spanish literature. The Wrong Blood is his first novel to be translated into English.

John Cullen is the translator of many books from the Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Enrique de Hériz’s Lies, Yasmina Khadra’s Middle East Trilogy (The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, The Sirens of Baghdad), Christa Wolf’s Medea, and Margaret Mazzantini’s Don’t Move. He lives in upstate New York.