El tiempo entre costuras (Spanish Edition) Book

Part historical novel, part spy novel, part romance, this book has a good story. A young woman grows up in poverty in Spain just before the Spanish Civil War. She works as an apprentice to her mother in a dress-making shop in Madrid. She sees another world as she goes in servant entrances to mansions making deliveries of dresses. Her awareness of these "two worlds" influences her when she reaches marriage age because she dumps the local guy who loves her and she runs off with a con man who is fleeing the police because of various frauds he's pulled off.

They flee across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spanish Morocco. After she experiences a brief time of living life with the jet set, he dumps her, stealing what money she had and leaving her stunned, pregnant and responsible for a huge hotel bill. This is when the real story begins. She can't run home to mother because the police won't let her leave until she pays off the bill. Anyway, travel between the two countries is essentially cut off because of the War. I'm not really giving away a lot of plot as we know all this very early in the book.

Spanish Morocco is a lot more exotic than it sounds; think: Casablanca, Marrakesh, Tangier, Fez, Rabat. She encounters a jumble of nationalities including various Arabic groups, Spanish, French, British, Jews, Germans, Moroccans, Russians. Some speak Haketia, an ancient but dying language of Sephardic Jews.



Our heroine settles into a boarding house run by a tough, street-smart woman who takes her under her wing and helps her set up her own dress-making shop. At the communal dining table every night the violent political arguments out foreshadow the Spanish Civil War. The Rif War, Spanish and French against Berber hill forces, has just ended, which in a roundabout way led to the Civil War in Spain. (Despite the easy-reading style, this is a serious historical novel with more than 50 scholarly works in the bibliography.) The Germans are cultivating Spain and Portugal as Allies. Although both countries remained neutral in WW II, their dictators, Franco and Salazar, were essentially rooting for Hitler and Mussolini.

Spanish Morocco is loaded with German businessmen and military men. This is when the second phases of her life begins. As a "dress-maker to the stars" she is in a perfect position to overhear gossip about upcoming events, the where and whens and who will be there. She is approached by British intelligence to become a spy and she agrees. Eventually she is sent back to Madrid and to Lisbon to open a shop and to spy. In this world, everyone is suspect. She starts falling in love with an Englishman doing business with the Germans. Is he a British agent? A German agent? A double agent?

A good read all the way through. It kept my interest for all 600+ pages.