Arturo Pérez-Reverte. In the Line of Fire

1938, the Spanish Civil War. For ten days, Republicans and Francoists have been fighting each other for the small town of Castellets del Segre, a town of no particular strategic importance. Intebrigadiers and Falangists, militias and "red berets," men and women, those who fought out of conviction and those conscripted against their will, the brave and the cowardly, those with nothing to lose and those with a place to return to—thousands of people united by so much and separated only by the front line, fighting and dying, not always remembering why, and until the last moment desperately refusing to die. This is war—and it gradually consumes everyone.
"At some point," says Arturo Pérez-Reverte, "you realize that in a civil war there is no good and evil—only a clash of one horror against another." "In the Line of Fire" is a novel about a real war, where there is no heroism, only naked, stripped-to-the-skeleton, and sometimes heroic humanity and the unrelenting fear of death. In this grand epic, real-life accounts are intertwined with literary fiction, and the small stories of countless people form a colossal, piercing picture in which it is impossible to choose whose side you are on, because on both sides there are simply people, and "the most vile thing is that the enemy calls for mother in your own language."
For the first time in Russian!