Arturo Pérez-Reverte

'Enviado Especial':

"I walked through a world at war trying to understand. I wasn't told about it. I was there, and this is what I saw."

For twenty-one years as a war correspondent, Arturo Pérez-Reverte experienced firsthand the most brutal conflicts of the last third of the 20th century. His experiences on war zones around the world shaped his life and left their mark on his later literary work. Over time, the former reporter crafted a war biography that is also one of the most extraordinary accounts of journalism in the Spanish language. This book brings together, in chronological order, a selection of chronicles and reports written in the seventies and eighties, along with articles published in recent decades on past and present conflicts, dignity and cowardice, truth and manipulation. In these pages, we share the memory of a man who went where very few wanted to go and told what many prefer to forget.

The author states in the prologue: “War stays in your head and never leaves you. It’s not just names and faces. Places return with the same stubbornness: Mostar, Sarajevo, Vukovar, Beirut, Malabo, Kassala, Managua, N’Djamena, Paso de la Yegua, Khartoum, Bucharest, Nairobi, El Aaiún, Baghdad, Luanda, Maputo, Tessenei, Petrinja… Over time, memories become clusters of cherries, each one leading to the next: a name brings to mind a bullet-riddled corner; a city brings to mind a face; a hotel room evokes a conversation; solitude or music makes you remember a road, a smile, or a grave. And this isn’t nostalgia, but simply the archive of a long life. The material with which one later writes novels and, some nights, sleepless in the dark, pays the price for having stared at humanity for so long without looking away.”

'Misión en París':

"Midnight was striking on the clocks  of Paris when four horsemen entered through the Saint-Jacques gate, as self-assured as the steady trot of their horses."

It is midnight. Íñigo Balboa, a member of the Catholic King's Royal Post Office, eagerly awaits the arrival of Captain Alatriste, Francisco de Quevedo, and Sebastián Copons in Paris, where he is to deliver dispatches to the Count of Guadalmedina. They have last seen each other in almost a year, since the completion of their perilous mission in Venice. These are turbulent times for France: for several months, the Huguenots of La Rochelle, with English support, have been under siege by French forces commanded by Cardinal Richelieu. Through Quevedo's intervention, Alatriste and his companions become embroiled in a dangerous secret mission devised by the Count-Duke of Olivares. This time, the objective is of such magnitude that the adventure they face could forever alter the course of events.