Torquemada

Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain's most important novelist after Cervantes, has been compared with Balzac and Dickens for his forceful and imaginative nineteenth-century realism. His great tetralogy Torquemada portrays middle-class Madrid society with a keen narrative eye and relentless narrative irony. Through this series of four novels, appearing here in one volume, Galdós stalks a Madrid moneylender as he rises from obscurity to great fortune and high social position.

Galdós' superb portrait follows the miserly Francisco de Torquemada–who shares more than a surname with the cruel architect of the Inquisition–from the time he is about 50 years old to his deathbed some ten years later. Bitingly sardonic in its view of the material values of Madrid in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Torquemada abounds with insightful and well-drawn characters; together these form a remarkable portrayal of Spanish bourgeois society

Combining the accuracy of a historian with the imaginative flair of a novelist, Torquemada brilliantly reveals why Galdós is not only a major Spanish writer but also one of the greatest of all nineteenth-century novelists.

This first English edition of Torquemada faithfully rendered by Frances M. López-Morillas, brings a European masterpiece to a new audience.