Colonel Archibald Hopkins, an
officer in His Majesty’s Army, could scarcely have imagined that a mission as
seemingly routine as accompanying the British delegation to the 1906
International Conference on Morocco, held in Algeciras, would change his life—and that of his family—forever.
The discovery of a warm and
welcoming land—where afternoon tea was served with churros and bullfighting
pasodobles coexisted with God Save the Queen—populated by characters
as colourful as they were endearing, would transform the worldview of this
battle-hardened soldier, a veteran of the Second Boer War.
From Algeciras to the
Dardanelles draws a parallel between the protagonist’s
personal journey and the political decisions often made far above the heads of
ordinary people. With an evocative and accessible tone, the novel portrays the
encounter between two markedly different cultures—the Anglo-Saxon and the
Andalusian—with Gibraltar as their cultural crossroads.
Most of the protagonists,
Britons who found themselves in southern Spain by a twist of fate, settled in
this corner of the world with the hopes and naïveté characteristic of the Belle
Époque. During this golden age of the British Empire, their lives unfolded in a
peaceful bourgeois bubble, only to be abruptly shaken by the outbreak of the
First World War.
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