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Sam Adams

The Road to Zarauz

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"The Perseids brought it all out of the past, with a force like a blow
that leaves you winded. The night lurched and seemed to swoop
suddenly down. The boy still lay on his back, but when I sat up,
gasping, I glimpsed the pale disc of his face as he turned to see what
had startled me.


‘It’s all right,’ I said, though it wasn’t."


It is the summer of 1954. Four young men on a summer vacation buy
an old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all the
way to the mountains of Spain. It is only a few years since the war,
Europe is still in ruins. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamers
and realists, men but not much more than boys. They have their whole
lives ahead of them. This will be their summer to remember.


A beautiful, elegiac rumination on youth, friendship and the dreams
that we hold. Sam Adams has created a rare novel in The Road to Zarauz, both
timeless and very much of a time and a place, a past of hope and
expectation erased in a moment, and what remains when hope is gone.


“A haunting meditation on memory and loss that takes the reader
on a summer road trip to a vanished Spain. In this well-crafted,
wistful novella, Sam Adams weaves his tapestry from fragments of
a remembered friendship in a coming of age tale written with sixty
years’ bitter hindsight.” – Richard Gwyn



Sam Adams is a poet and novelist. He has written extensively on poetry and prose as an editor and critic. Adams is a former editor of Poetry Wales, and a
former chairman of the English-language section of Yr Academi Gymreig. He edited the Collected Poems and the Collected Stories of Roland
Mathias, is the author of three monographs in the Writers of Wales series and is a frequent contributor of poems, criticism and essays to a number of magazines. His ‘Letter from Wales’ column appears regularly in PN Review (Carcanet). For further information:
www.samadams.com