Javier Cercas’s new novel, ‘Lord of All the Dead’, is as preoccupied with the Spanish Civil War, the nature of heroism, and the distortions of history as his most famous, ‘Soldiers of Salamis’, says Alannah Hopkin .

Literature doesn’t get much stranger — nor more fun — than this. 

IMAGINE Dostoevsky and Flann O’Brien had an adventure and you got to hear about it second-hand from Haruki Murakami. That is what it is like to read Roberto Arlt’s 1929 novel Los Siete Locos — or, as it is presented here, The Seven Madmen — a rollicking and prescient dive through the anxieties of an urban Argentina on the cusp of transformation.

Selma Dabbagh

Antwerp