Sepharad

By: Antonio Muñoz Molina

Narrated by: David DeSantos

From one of Spain's most celebrated writers, an extraordinary, inspired book - at once fiction, history, and memoir - that draws on the Sephardic diaspora, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges to tell a twentieth-century story.

Shifting seamlessly from the past to the present and following the routes of escape across countries and continents, Muoz Molina evokes people real and imagined who come together in a richly allusive pattern - from Eugenia Ginsburg to Grete Buber-Neumann, the one on a train to the gulag, the other heading toward - a Nazi concentration camp; from a shoemaker and a nun who become lovers in a small Spanish town to Primo Levi bound for Auschwitz.

From the well known to the virtually unknown - all of Molina's characters are voices of separation, nostalgia, love, and endless waiting.

Written with clarity of vision and passion, in a style both lyrical and accessible, Sepharad makes the experience our own.

©2001 Antonio Munoz Molina; English translation (c) 2003 by Margaret Sayers Peden (P)2010 Audible, Inc

Excellent performance

What did you love best about Sepharad?

In fact, this book may be more appropriate for reading on the page. The impressionistic, meditative narrative is hard to follow in audio. But... I loved the narrator! He voiced the poetic, meandering mood of the book perfectly. Besides, I enjoyed having a book translated from Spanish read by a narrator with a Spanish accent.

What did you like best about this story?

Just beautiful. (Though certainly not a book for people who expect fast-paced action!)

Have you listened to any of David DeSantos’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

This is first time I heard DeSantos. He is a great match for this book.

If you could rename Sepharad, what would you call it?

Why rename? True, the title may raise the expectation that this book is about Jewish Spain, which it isn't. But I like having my expectations overturned.