The alluring but treacherous borderlands between fact and fiction have never been more attractive to writers and readers, and the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas knows the territory well. A previous book, The Soldiers of Salamis, was a brilliant and original semi-fictional exploration of the Spanish Civil War; here he returns to another crucial episode in the history of his country in this dense but gripping, almost Shakespearean account of soldiers, politicians, mixed motives and the lust for power.

Cercas is a major novelist who has written a fascinating account of a key event in Spain's recent history. Although 30 years have passed, the coup still reverberates. Many argue that, though the coup failed, it triumphed (one of the many paradoxes Cercas delights in): it forced the political class to grow up or, a more sinister consequence, it made politicians fall over each other to give the military what it wanted, a modernised NATO army and a more restricted democracy. Cercas's decision to write fact not fiction is vindicated. He forces us to abandon the fiction, the legends of the coup, and look at the pictures and story anew in all their complexity.