Biography
Xavier Alcalá is one of Galicia’s most established writers. He has published over twenty works of fiction in the last thirty years. Themes in his work include emigration and the Spanish Civil War. Most recently he has published the trilogy Evangelical Memory, an extremely well documented account of the experiences of the Evangelical communities in Galicia during the twentieth century. Other well known novels include Our Ashes and Fable. He has written widely about his travels in Latin America and been a regular contributor to Galician newspapers since the 1970s. He is a trained telecommunications engineer with a PhD in computer science and lives and works in Brussels.
Synopsis
The novel Between Frontiers (348 pages) is the first book in the trilogy Evangelical Memory dealing with the experiences of the Evangelical communities in Galicia from the reign of Alfonso XIII (1886-1931) to the death of Franco in 1975. Between Frontiers goes as far as the Spanish Civil War; the second book, In the Catacombs, deals with the postwar; and the third book, A False Light, with the time of Franco’s dictatorship.
Sample
‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’
Thou shalt surely die, yes.
At my age, there has been so much death that dying is no longer a case of fear, but of waiting or perhaps warning when one hears of the departure of someone close…
Portico of Galician Literature 