Javier Cercas and Gaby Wood: ‘Lord of All the Dead’

‘This past is a dimension of the present, without which the present is mutilated.’

In Lord of all the Dead, Javier Cercas plunges back into his family history, revisiting Ibahernando, his parents' village in southern Spain, to discover the truth about his ancestor Manuel Mena, who died fighting on the Francoist side at the Battle of the Ebro. Who are we to judge the dead? How can we reconcile national and family history, the political and the domestic?

Cercas was in conversation with Gaby Wood, journalist and literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation.

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