This month, I’m having a FAN-tastic Fiesta, to celebrate the launch of my Andalucían Nights trilogy in a special, all-in-one edition.

The award-winning epic Andalucían Nights Trilogy sweeps the reader from the wild landscapes of Spain in the 1950s, through a history of dangerous liaisons and revenge dramas, to a modern world of undercover missions and buried secrets. Romantic, exotic and deeply compelling, and featuring a brilliant cast of characters, including a passionate young gypsy, a troubled young writer and an estranged family, The Andalucían Nights Trilogy is a romantic treat waiting to be discovered.

Available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Andalucian-Nights-Trilogy-Award-winning-Romantic-ebook/dp/B06XKZ2XKC/

You’ll find my Fiesta touring on various book blogs in the next two weeks; be sure to check my Facebook and Twitter to read excerpts and guest posts on the books.

Here’s what you can win in the Fiesta!

That’s six prize in total: each book in the Andalucían Nights trilogy, plus three beautiful, authentic Spanish hand fans. Entry is open to all (I will post internationally) via the Rafflecopter form below.

All that is left to say is Buena suerte – Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

There is so much that drew me to the Spanish region of Andalucía when it came time to choose a setting for my romantic trilogy. But given that core themes in the trilogy are roots and legacies, the rich history of the Andalucía was a big attraction.

Andalucía is steeped in history. I have written before about the Moors who ruled ‘Al-Andalus’, modern-day Andalucía, from 711 to 1492 (see my blog post http://hannahfielding.net/the-moorish-legacy-in-andalucia/), and today I want to focus on another important people who took control of Andalucía and helped to shape its history: the Romans.

The Roman occupation of Andalucía dates back to the sixth century AD. They conquered the region, which was controlled by the Carthaginians, and bought it into their empire, naming it Baetica (part of Spania). It became an important part of the Roman Empire: emperors Trajan and Hadrian hailed from here, and in mythology Hercules was said to have founded the city of Cadiz.

The Romans lost Andalucía to the Moors many centuries ago, and yet their influence is felt still, most especially in the distinctive architecture of the region. The Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba (the Mezquita) is a beautiful example of Roman-inspired Moorish architecture. It was in fact constructed using materials from Roman buildings, including a temple dedicated to Janus that had stood on the site and the Amphitheatre of Mérida.

 

For me, original Roman buildings are even more interesting. When I visited Andalucía, I spent some time touring archaeological sites. I especially loved the Roman amphitheatres: the Acinipo, near Ronda; the Italica, Seville; and the Malaga theatre.

[Picture credits: Apinicio Falconaumanni; Malaga Andy Nash; Italica Diego Delso.]

Baleo Claudia, in the Cadiz province, is really stunning. There, archaeologists have uncovered an ancient town, complete with basilica, theatre, market, and the temple of Isis – all at a spectacular stretch of coastline.

I found stepping back into the Roman Empire in Andalucía fascinating – and inspirational. When you read my Andalucían Nights trilogy, you will find echoes of the distant Roman past interspersed in these modern-era stories.

For example, in Indiscretion Salvador considers what makes the Andalucían horses the family breed so special:

‘Look at our cartujanos. Over the centuries, their bloodline lost its purity and was injected with new strains that have made it stronger. Today, not only does the blood of their Moorish ancestors run in them, but also that of the Nubian horse, which the Romans used in their chariot races.’

Also in Indiscretion, the heroine Alexandra visits Ronda, and feels a sense of the past when she steps into the bullring:

The following afternoon, La Plaza de Toros in Ronda was drenched with the blinding white glare of a fierce sun. The huge, tragic amphitheatre with its floor of red sand, reminiscent of the Roman arenas of old, had been the scene of many bloody and barbarous combats between man and beast since the end of the eighteenth century.

I could not resist drawing on the Roman influence in my characterisation as well. In Legacy, for example, the heroine finds herself likening Ruy to a Roman god.

He was coming towards her, bare-chested, his eyes shining. He looked like a primitive Roman god and the sexual stir she felt in her belly was instant, confusing her thoughts.

Of course, beyond Andalucía itself, another Roman influence can be found in all my writing – that of the great Roman philosophers, Marcus Aurelius in particular. I will leave you with one of my favourite Aurelius quotations from Meditations, whose sentiment guides my writing hand:

‘Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.’ 

In my twenties, after graduating university, I travelled around Europe, keen to visit places I had read so much about. Andalucía was one such place; it had cropped up so many times in the literature I had read.

There was Washington Irving’s captivating Tales of the Alhambra, in which he described in such vivid detail his approach to the complex of Moorish palaces:

In the wild passes of these mountains the sight of walled towns and villages, built like eagles’ nests among the cliffs, and surrounded by Moorish battlements, or of ruined watchtowers perched on lofty peaks, carries the mind back to the chivalric days of Christian and Moslem warfare, and to the romantic struggle for the conquest of Granada. In traversing these lofty sierras the traveller is often obliged to alight, and lead his horse up and down the steep and jagged ascents and descents, resembling the broken steps of a staircase.

Sometimes the road winds along dizzy precipices, without parapet to guard him from the gulfs below, and then will plunge down steep, and dark, and dangerous declivities. Sometimes it struggles through rugged barrancos, or ravines, worn by winter torrents, the obscure path of the contrabandista; while, ever and anon, the ominous cross, the monument of robbery and murder, erected on a mound of stones at some lonely part of the road, admonishes the traveller that he is among the haunts of banditti, perhaps at that very moment under the eye of some lurking bandolero. Sometimes, in winding through the narrow valleys, he is startled by a hoarse bellowing, and beholds above him on some green fold of the mountain a herd of fierce Andalusian bulls, destined for the combat of the arena. I have felt, if I may so express it, an agreeable horror in thus contemplating, near at hand, these terrific animals, clothed with tremendous strength, and ranging their native pastures in untamed wildness, strangers almost to the face of man: they know no one but the solitary herdsman who attends upon them, and even he at times dares not venture to approach them. The low bellowing of these bulls, and their menacing aspect as they look down from their rocky height, give additional wildness to the savage scenery.

There was Lord Byron’s romantic depictions of the Andalusian cities of Seville and Cádiz in his poetry, most prominently in Childe Harold, but most beautifully, for me, in ‘The Girl of Cadiz’:

The Spanish girl that meets your love

Ne’er taunts you with a mock denial;

For every thought is bent to prove

Her passion in the hour of trial.

When thronging foemen menace Spain

She dares the deed and shares the danger;

And should her lover press the plain,

She hurls the spear, her love’s avenger.

There was Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, whose words stand as the epigraph for Indiscretion: ‘To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.’ He showed the world the ‘hidden Andalucía’, and with such passion, as here in his poem ‘Sleepingwalking Ballad’:

Green, how I want you green.

Big hoarfrost stars

come with the fish of shadow

that opens the road of dawn.

The fig tree rubs its wind

with the sandpaper of its branches,

and the forest, cunning cat,

bristles its brittle fibers.

But who will come? And from where?

She is still on her balcony

green flesh, her hair green,

dreaming in the bitter sea.

There was Ernest Hemingway’s colourful and raw descriptions of Andalucían culture, most notably the corrida (bull fight), as in this excerpt from Death in the Afternoon:

All supposed exterior signs of danger that a bull gives, such as pawing the ground, threatening with his horns, or bellowing are forms of bluffing. They are warnings given in order that combat may be avoided if possible. The truly brave bull gives no warning before he charges except the fixing of his eye on the enemy, the raising of the crest of muscle in his neck, the twitching of an ear, and, as he charges, the lifting of his tail.

All of this, and more, led me to Andalucía, where, like the writers who came before me, I found so much inspiration in the way of life there and the beautiful scenery. In my novels Indiscretion, Masquerade and Legacy I endeavour to transport my readers to this unique Spanish region, so that they too may experience the place where ‘blood boils without fire’.

If you are interested in the literary history of Andalucía, I can recommend Andrew and Suzanne Edwards’ book Andalucía: A Literary Guide for Travellers. Beware, though: reading this book could be costly; you may well find yourself buying a plane ticket to Spain…

If you’re reading this blog post, it’s a safe assumption that you’re a reader: you enjoy reading books (perhaps even my own novels; I do hope so). Consider these questions:

How much time do you devote to reading?

In your reading time, which books do you choose to read?

Whatever your answers, I wonder: do you feel satisfied by them? Is the time you devote to reading enough? Are you reading books that really enrich your life?

I had cause to ponder on these questions after reading an article entitled ‘How many books will you read before you die?’ (Lit Hub). The author of the article attempts to estimate how many more books are on your ‘to be read’ shelf, depending on your reading speed, your gender and your age. Based on her calculations, a thirty-year-old lady who is a voracious reader (defined as reading fifty books per year) has 2,800 books left to read; thirty years later, aged sixty, she has 1,100.

My first thought, upon reading the estimates, was this: none of them are enough!

Have you come across the term ‘abibliophobia’? It’s the fear of running out of reading material. I think we need a new term to mean fear of running out of time to read all you want to read. Chronophobia is anxiety over the passage of time; perhaps chronobibliophobia?

Do you identify with that fear?

Half of the issue is time. How much time do you make for reading? Is it enough? Ought you to clear more time for reading?

Recently, I watched a British film called About Time, in which a young man discovers the men in his family have a special ability: to travel in time to places and times they have been before. As the father explains this gift to his son, the son asks him how he has used the gift over the years. His answer: he read many books. The father went back in time to give himself more time to sit in a chair and read and read. Perfect, don’t you think? Here, in case I’ve piqued your interest, is the scene in which the father breaks the big news to his son:

The other half of the issue concerns your choice of book. There are so many millions of books in the world, and so of course you can read only a very small proportion. How do you choose?

The answer, I think, lies in always looking for new reads: classic and contemporary novels alike that you discover through rummaging in bookstores and libraries, and reading reviews online. In the New York Times Book Review, the writer Hari Kunzru explains that he no longer finishes a book if he’s not enjoying it; ‘once you’ve established your taste, and the penny drops that there are only a certain number of books you’ll get to read before you die, reading bad ones becomes almost nauseating’. So perhaps it is best to give yourself permission to give up on books and move on.

Whatever you do, though, don’t limit yourself to reading only ‘within your taste’; the key, I think, is to keep challenging yourself. I will leave you with two quotations that really bring home the importance of making time to read the books you want to read:

‘It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘I am a part of all I have read.’ – John Kieran

I was in my twenties when I first came to England. I recall vividly my first Christmas; it was bitterly cold, which was a shock after a lifetime of Christmases in sunny Alexandria, Egypt; but then it snowed and I was enchanted, and I understood Charles Baudelaire’s verse:

I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns;
And when comes the winter snow monotonous,
I shut all the doors and shutters
To build in the night my fairy palace.

Of the many differences I noted between Christmas in Egypt and in the UK, one that stood out was that today, 26th December, was called ‘Boxing Day’. I had no idea what that meant, but as the years went by I came to understand that it was a national holiday in the UK and Commonwealth nations devoted largely to shopping, football and hunting.

But when came the day that one of my children asked me the meaning of Boxing Day, I realised it must have a deeper significance than simply the launch of sales or a football fixtures highlight, and so I took myself to that most soulful of places, the library, and researched. This is what I learned.

‘Boxing’ Day is so-called because it evolved as a day on which servants and tradespeople would receive a ‘Christmas box’, containing gifts and/or money in gratitude for services rendered over the year and especially as thanks for having worked on Christmas day for a master/employer. The custom of giving the box was in evidence as far back as 1663, because Samuel Pepys recorded it in his diary that December. (It is markedly not in evidence, however, in Charles’ Dickens’ A Christmas Carol of 1843, though Ebenezer Scrooge should certainly have been rewarding Bob Cratchit with a box.)

A secondary meaning commonly attributed to the ‘Boxing’ is that back in late Roman/early Christian times collection boxes were placed outside churches for the Feast of Saint Stephen, which is the 26th of December, when the boxes were opened and the coins within distributed to the poor and needy.

Delve a little deeper into history, however, and you find another source for Boxing Day, this one more in keeping with playing sports, as suggested by the ‘boxing’ (which, if you’re wondering, is a sport that dates back to the ancient Greeks). The forerunner of Christmas as we know it was the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, for the god Saturn. Part of this festival, celebrated in December, was a day of dancing and contact sports like boxing.

Today, Boxing Day can be a day for gathering together as a family, or it can be a day for sports and shopping (although campaigners are currently trying to change the latter; a petition with 200,000 signatures was handed to the prime minister in 2016 demanding shops be closed by law to allow for more family time).

Boxing Day has also become a day for eccentricity in some parts. In Ireland, for example, ‘Wren boys’ collect money for charity by signing carols dressed in ladies’ clothes and carrying toy birds in cages. This custom is a modification of an old tradition in which the Wren boys would stone wrens to death and give the feathers to people in exchange for donations (it is lucky to kill a wren on St Stephen’s Day, apparently; the saint himself was stoned to death for his faith).

Elsewhere in the UK, Boxing Day has an altogether more exuberant meaning. For many, this is the day to jump into a freezing-cold ocean in fancy dress! The Boxing Day Dip is held on beaches around the UK, and is a fun way to raise money for charity, with those take a dip in crazy costumes being sponsored for their bravery.

So there you have it, Boxing Day. What does this day hold for you? I would love to hear about your own traditions.