It is the summer of 1954. Four young men on a summer vacation buy an old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all the way to the mountains of Spain. It is only a few years since the war, Europe is still in ruins. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamers and realists, men but not much more than boys. They have their whole lives ahead of them. This will be their summer to remember. A beautiful, elegiac rumination on youth, friendship and the dreams that we hold. Sam Adams has created a rare novel in The Road to Zarauz, both timeless and very much of a time and a place, a past of hope and expectation erased in a moment, and what remains when hope is gone.

Sam Adams is a poet and novelist. He has written extensively on poetry and prose as an editor and critic. Adams is a former editor of Poetry Wales, and a former chairman of the English-language section of Yr Academi Gymreig. He edited the Collected Poems and the Collected Stories of RolandMathias, is the author of three monographs in the Writers of Wales series and is a frequent contributor of poems, criticism and essays to a number of magazines. His 'Letter from Wales' column appears regularly in PN Review (Carcanet).