“I don’t know if you ever were an anarchist,” Antonio accuses an ex-confrere, “but now you’ve turned into the opposite.

If it weren’t for a few sex scenes, The Art of Flying would be an ideal book for young readers, as it wears its social and historical analysis on its sleeve. You will be moved and angered and want to know what happens next. Subtle this book is not, but neither were the ideologies that tore Spain apart. “We were like birds at work building our own cage,” reflects Antonio when, having exchanged backbreaking toil in the countryside for backbreaking toil in the city, he ends up doing backbreaking toil in a refugee camp. Walls, barriers and allusions to flight abound, as the author details the myriad ways society and politics kept his father penned in and grounded. History hands Altarriba plenty of these metaphors on a plate, and he is only too willing to use them. “You see something?” asks one of the lads when his brother has clambered up a wall. The remainder of the book – punctuated by chapter dividers depicting the old man’s progress towards the ground – shows us the life that led to this final bid for freedom.Īntonio’s early years are spent in the rural backwater of Aragon, where hardscrabble farmers filch their neighbours’ land furrow by furrow, until each peasant is provoked to fortify his territory with high stone fences, trapping the hapless children inside a maze of barriers. We meet the decrepit Antonio Senior as he gives his nurses the slip and jumps from the window of his nursing home.

It evokes Spain’s complicated, cruel 20th century through the experience of the author’s father. The Art of Flying has taken six years to land in the UK despite winning numerous awards.

El arte de volar by Antonio Altarriba