In the Night of Time

October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer's son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever alters his life.

A rich, panoramic portrait of Spain on the brink of civil war, In the Night of Time details the passions and tragedies of a country tearing itself apart. Compared in scope and importance to War and Peace, Muñoz Molina's masterpiece is the great epic of the Spanish Civil War written by one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists.

An immense, luminous panorama of the Spanish Civil War ... one of the many wonders of this novel is how Molina integrates the personal so closely with the political ... he brings an encyclopedic knowledge of the times to bear ... compellingly seductive – Independent

Exhilarating ... exceptional ... a necessary novel. Edith Grossman's translation compellingly captures its depiction of the ugliness of war and the remorselessness of human memory when many in Spain, nearly eight decades on, would like to consign the civil war to oblivion. - Adam Feinstein, Financial Times

Sweeping, magisterial ... an astonishingly vivid narrative that unfolds with hypnotic intensity by means of the constant interweaving of time and memory ... Tolstoyan in its scale, emotional intensity and intellectual honesty. – Economist

An epic...Molina's cogent examination of war on a scale both large and small reaffirms his place as a giant of Europe's literary scene, well-worth being discovered by American readers - The Daily Beast

Spellbinding ... what distinguishes In the Night of Time - what makes it eye-openingly new - is its meticulous reconstruction of Spain in 1936, its attention to detail, its fusion of history and imagination, its tension between love's surrender and war's stiff resolve. Let me put it this way: Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel is one of the most eloquent monuments to the Spanish Civil War ever to be raised in fiction. - Washington Post