The Painter of Battles » (Reprint)

Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s bestselling books, including The Club Dumas, The Flanders Panel, The Seville Communion, and the Captain Alatriste series, have been translated into thirty-four languages in fifty countries and have sold millions of copies. Pérez-Reverte was born in 1951 in Cartagena, Spain, and now lives in Madrid, where he was recently elected to the Spanish Royal Academy. A retired war journalist, he covered conflicts in Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, El Salvador, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Romania, the Persian Gulf, and Sudan, among others. He now writes fiction full-time.

Acclaimed author Arturo Pérez-Reverte has earned a distinguished reputation as a master of the literary thriller. Now, he gives us his most accomplished novel to date.

Andrés Faulques, a world-renowned war photographer, has retired to a life of solitude on the Spanish coast. He spends his days painting a huge mural that pays homage to history’s classic works of war art and that incorporates a lifetime of disturbing images.

One night, an unexpected visitor arrives at Faulques’ door and challenges the painter to remember him. As Faulques struggles to recall the face, the man explains that he was the subject of an iconic photo taken by Faulques in a war zone years ago. “And why have you come looking for me?” asks Faulques. The stranger answers, “Because I’m going to kill you.”

This story transports Faulques to the time when he crossed continents to capture conflicts on film with his lover, Olvido, at his side. Until she walked into his life, Faulques muses, he had believed he would survive both war and women.

As the tense dialogue between Faulques and his visitor continues, the stakes grow ever higher. What they are grappling with quickly proves to be not just Faulques’ fate but the very nature of human love and cruelty itself, in this stunning composition on morality. Superb and tautly written, The Painter of Battles is a deeply affecting audiobook about life and art.

Publishers Weekly

Pérez-Reverte delivers a wonderfully suspenseful wartime thriller about a painter and photographer who receives a visit from his troubled past in the form of a man who was the subject of one of his photographs. Simon Vance's classical British accent brings added life to the story, offering a vivid reading that will transport listeners to another time and place. His delivery is clear and often unnerving, knowing exactly when and where to capture the profound sense of foreboding and tension that abounds. Vance's performance is remarkable. He brings central character Andres Faulques into existence through a tremendous attention to detail and dialect and a firm understanding of Pérez-Reverte's gripping tale. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 26, 2007). (Feb.)

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