Los amores oscuros

“I was Lorca’s last love and, perhaps, the reason for his death.” Thus begins the novel that reveals the love affair that kept the poet from fleeing Spain despite the grave danger he faced. Dark Loves transports us to the happy final days of Federico García Lorca, when Spain was experiencing turbulent times under the Black Biennium and the author of Yerma was enjoying his complete acclaim. However, what truly made him a man whole was his relationship with a young man who reciprocated his feelings with unwavering, mature, and passionate devotion. Federico would later introduce him to his closest circle of friends: Rafael de León, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rafael Alberti, Margarita Xirgu, Vicente Aleixandre, and Miguel Hernández. He would also introduce him to the women of the Lyceum Club Femenino, so often forgotten yet so essential to his world: Pura Ucelay, María Teresa León, and Lola Membrives, accomplices of the poet who, at that time, composed the verses to his beloved that would become Sonnets of Dark Love. However, such joy is tinged with a tragic fate. Lorca is becoming a champion and icon of a school of thought over which unsettling threats loom. Dark Loves is a cult classic of Spanish literature. A superb, meticulously researched, and incisive novel that portrays the turbulent Madrid of the 1930s, the political and social disputes in a Spain on the verge of collapse. But above all, it reclaims a luminous love story, condemned for years to obscurity.