The Road to Zarauz

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.

"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 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.