A masterly crafted and haunting tale of survival, longing, and empathy, set during the Spanish Civil War.

“Julian Zabalbeascoa is ferociously brilliant at rendering both the epic sweep of history—Franco’s rise to power, the Spanish Civil War—and the particular contours of daily life. The wineskins soldiers stash under their hospital mattresses. A bit of cake dipped in marmalade. The "metallic whistle” of a rifle shell. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a stunningly powerful novel about the individual acts of courage and violence that have shaped history as we know it. A virtuosic and unforgettable debut.” —Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise

In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain, spurred to join the fight to preserve his country's democracy from the insurrectionists by the rousing words of a political essayist. Months earlier, Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain's newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup, but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.

In Bilbao, Mariana raises her two young children while, with her writing, she decries the fascist-backed coup attempt and their German and Italian allies, imploring the world to support democracy. As the Nationalist forces assault the country, Mariana and Isidro's lives intersect fleetingly, yet in meaningful and lasting ways.

Through a chorus of voices--a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her in order to fight against the fascists, among others--we follow Isidro and Mariana as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart. Julian Zabalbeascoa is a fierce and assured new talent, and What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a remarkable feat of research and imagination, as well as a transcendent literary accomplishment.

“What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a startling book, beautiful and horrific, that navigates the complexities of Basque Country during the Spanish Civil War, in which fascism and communism, regionalism and nationalism, and faith and skepticism do battle across a brilliantly evoked, suffering landscape." —Phil Klay, National Book Award winning author of Redeployment and Missionaries

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Julian Zabalbeascoa’s fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Ploughshares, among other journals. He divides his time between Boston and the Basque Country in Spain. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is his first novel.

 

Kirmen Uribe writes in Basque. He is one of the most relevant and widely translated writers of his generation in Spain. He won that country's National Prize for Literature for his first novel, Bilbao–New York–Bilbao (Coffee House Press, 2022). Previously, his first poetry collection Meanwhile Take My Hand was published by Graywolf in 2007. Uribe’s works have appeared in periodicals such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review. He was selected for the Iowa International Writers Program in 2017 and awarded a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship for 2018-2019. He is now based in New York City where he is Writer in Residence in the MFA of Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University (NYU). His latest novel, The Past Life of Dolphins will be released by Coffee House Press in fall 2025.

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