"Pandaemonium Moon is a startling and powerful work about one of the most dramatic eras of modern history. The rise of fascism and the war in Spain are rendered as if they are happening now, under our watch. The prose is effortless, and the story is so powerful, it made me wish I'd been alive at the time so I could help fight."
-Sebastian Junger, New York Times Bestselling Author
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Arthur Rosen is a young Jewish man living in Brooklyn in 1936, watching with growing alarm as fascism spreads across Europe and begins to cast its shadow over America. When a confrontation with a Nazi brownshirt turns deadly, and Arthur kills the man in self-defense, he realizes that the danger is no longer something he can simply observe from a distance. With his life threatened and nowhere left to hide, Arthur flees the United States and makes his way to Spain.
There, he finds a country already tearing itself apart.
The Spanish Republic has been attacked by an army led by General Francisco Franco, whose ambition is to destroy the Republic and establish a right-wing dictatorship supported by Spain's aristocracy, the Catholic Church, and the military power of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. As German planes bomb Spanish cities and Italian troops pour across the border, Spain becomes the battlefield on which the future of Europe may be decided.
From around the world, nearly 40,000 young men and women abandon their homes, families, and ordinary lives to travel to Spain. They come with little more than their convictions, determined to stand against fascism before it can spread beyond Spain's borders. They are the International Brigades.
Arthur joins their ranks.
Thrown into the brutal reality of modern warfare, he quickly discovers that courage and conviction offer little protection against bullets, artillery, hunger, exhaustion, and death. Amid the chaos, he encounters two women whose lives have been transformed by the war.
One is a beautiful Spanish woman assigned to photograph the conflict and document its atrocities. Moving through bombed streets and shattered villages with her camera, she records the suffering of civilians while struggling to preserve her own humanity. The other is a young woman from a small Spanish village whose life has been destroyed by the violence of Franco's advancing forces. Having lost almost everything, she arrives in Madrid determined not to become another victim. Instead, she joins the fight.
As Franco's armies close in on Madrid, the three strangers are drawn together by circumstances none of them could have foreseen. The city becomes both sanctuary and battlefield as its defenders refuse to surrender, even while bombs fall from the skies and Franco's forces press relentlessly toward the capital.
Through the eyes of Arthur, the photographer, and the young Spanish fighter, Pandaemonium Moon brings the Spanish Civil War vividly to life-the idealism of the International Brigades, the terror of aerial bombardment, the courage of ordinary civilians, and the terrible cost of choosing a side. As the siege of Madrid gives way to longer and increasingly bitter battles, their personal struggles become inseparable from the fate of a nation.
The first English-language novel to be fully set against the Spanish Civil War since Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Pandaemonium Moon is an epic story of war, love, sacrifice, and resistance-a powerful portrait of the young men and women who crossed continents to fight fascism and of the people who were already fighting simply to survive.