?The English Eternal Summer? is, in a way, a return visit to the one paid to us, in their day, by romantic European travellers British in particular. Readers will find in this book as much originality and exoticism as those travellers did in the Spain of the 18th, 19th and even the 20th centuries. It tells, not so much the history of the English Cemetery of Malaga, the first Protestant graveyard in our country, but the story of the lives, lived to the full, of those who rest there, unique and unrepeatable fragments of the fascinating mosaic that was formed by foreign communities in the South of Spain, together with passers-by, writers, fugitives, seamen, missionaries, spies, tourists, actresses, tradesmen, the shipwrecked and the stateless, all of whom came to rest in an eternal sleep in that beautiful cemetery, a botanical garden in fact, that still survives on the hillside of the Gibralfaro.
Rafael Torres concentrates into this book all his research, and his ability to interpret the past against a cosmopolitan backdrop, full of history, full of life: the Protestant Cemetery of Malaga. In it there are no large funerary monuments, or many celebrities, but there are real events, many forgotten or thus far unknown, of two centuries of revolutions, wars, progress, epidemics, of trade, voyages and adventures in that corner of Europe where so many chose to live and die.
Rafael Torres (Madrid, 1955), autor de la heptalogía sobre la Guerra de España que se ha convertido en referencia indispensable de los actuales trabajos de recuperación de la memoria histórica, es también el veterano y reconocido periodista que desde la prensa escrita ("OTR-Europa Press", "El Mundo"...), la radio (RNE) y la televisión (Tele5) viene aportando su voz crítica, original e independiente, contra viento y marea, desde hace casi treinta años. Autor, igualmente, de una obra literaria heteróclita e intensa (poesía, ensayo, narrativa, historia...), su novela Ese cadáver, que inauguraba su serie sobre la Guerra Civil, Los esclavos de Franco, Víctimas de la victoria, Desparecidos de la Guerra de España, Heridos, etc., obtuvo un particular éxito en Francia, en algunas de cuyas universidades se ha instituido como lectura recomendada y objeto de numerosas tesis académicas, en tanto que la novela que clausura la citada heptalogía, Los naúfragos del Stanbrook, mereció el XXXVI Premio Ateneo de Sevilla.Rafael Torres recupera, tanto en su obra literaria como en su labor periodística, la figura del intelectual comprometido con su tiempo y con el mejoramiento de la sociedad.
