Encarnita's Journey

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Spanish tale is Lingard at height of her storytelling powers - Rated
Gerald Brenan and Laurie Lee figure high in the ranks of British authors who have fired the imagination of generations with accounts of Spanish life in earlier decades of the twentieth century.

Brenan’s South from Granada, and Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, captured the passions, joys and sorrows of the country in the 1920s and 30s. They move some modern readers to make literary pilgrimages to Brenan’s Alpujarras, the valley bounded northwards by the Sierra Nevada, and Lee’s Almuñécar, the Granada province seaside resort.

Pilgrims in recent years include Joan Lingard, the Scottish writer whose fascination with Brenan, and the child he sired by a village maid, led to the Alpujarran pueblo of Yegen becoming the cradle of Lingard’s latest novel.

Encarnita’s Journey is a compelling saga woven around one Spanish woman’s life, from the Yegen of Brenan days, via Lee’s Almuñécar in the shadow of the civil war, to the latterly prosperous resort of Nerja.

It works on all levels – as a good yarn, as a novelisation of history involving literary figures including Brenan and members of the Bloomsbury set who visited Yegen, as a mini-chronicle of modern Spanish history, and as a monument to the lives of Spanish women over eight tumultuous decades.

Encarnita’s journey, geographically and metaphorically, is fired by Brenan teaching her a little English and about the wider world beyond the village. It is a life affirming tale of how a small act of kindness inspires a quest that is delayed by extraordinary circumstances but remains unextinguished until the final act can be played out.

Best known for her children’s books, including Tell The Moon to Come Out, which also climaxes in Nerja, Lingard is nevertheless one of the most satisfying writers of novels which weave past and present. She spends part of the winter in Nerja each year, hence her interest in the area's regional history.

This is the work of a craftswoman at the peak of her storytelling and researching powers.