Cathedral of the Sea

by Ildefonso Falcones

Book Overview

An unforgettable fresco of a golden age in fourteenth-century Barcelona, Cathedral of the Sea is a thrilling historical novel of friendship and revenge, plague and hope, love and war.

Arnau Estanyol arrives in Barcelona to find a city dominated by the construction of the city's great pride--the cathedral of Santa Maria del Mar--and by its shame, the deadly Inquisition. As a young man, Arnau joins the powerful guild of stoneworkers...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451225996
• ISBN13: 9780451225993
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Berkley Books
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.9" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Cathedral of the Sea

This is a great book that explains how big cathedrals were made. The people involved were poor but struggled to make a better life in having faith in there religion. Love and hardship are a struggle and it takes years to accomplish their needs. Prisons were horrible and cruel. This book has good history and detailed in the 1500 century.

Outstanding historical novel

A well written novel that grabs you from the beginning with the reality of life without power in the middle ages. Only by banding together into guilds were ordinary people able to protect themselves from abuses by the church and the aristocracy. Reading this book brings history to life if you are visiting Barcelona and surrounding area.

"Can these people really be your representatives?" - Arnau Estanyol

Ildefonso Falcones' novel, set in Catalonia, has been compared to Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, both positively and negatively. Pillars of the Earth is one of my favorite books, but I have enjoyed Falcones also, even though its style is different. Follett's book is a consistent page-turner; Cathedral begins more slowly but as the plot and characters develop, becomes a real page-turner also. Falcones includes helpful background history of Barcelona and 14th century Europe which will probably be unfamiliar to most American readers. You may want to skim the sections which describe the battles for control of the Mediterranean and for recapture of the areas of France which were originally Catalan. You can still understand the story without remembering the names of all those kings! Cathedral was a best-seller in Europe. I would never have heard of it had I not found a copy in my hotel breakfast room in Bordeaux this summer. It was written in Spanish and has been ably, but not flashily, translated into English. The style is plain and direct. If you don't require heightened dramatic language in your fiction, then perhaps you will like this book. The title reflects the setting of the book, Barcelona during the years when the cathedral Santa Maria de la Mar was built. If the descriptions pique your curiosity, google the cathedral and you will find wonderful pictures on various web sites. Its design is unusual and the story of its construction "by the people and for the people" of Barcelona is worth knowing. This book is a fine way to learn more about medieval Catalonia while enjoying the ins and outs of a complex plot, plenty of moral conflict, and interesting, unpredictable characters. We first meet Arnau Estanyol as a baby, when his father Bernat is forced by his feudal lord's violence to choose between servitude on his own land or a chance of freedom if he flees to his sister in Barcelona. At the age of fourteen, Arnau joins the Barcelona guild of bastaixos, or porters, who load and unload cargo from the ships and who serve the Virgin of the Sea by carrying the stones from which her cathedral is to be built. (You can find a photo of a relief sculpture of such a porter on the website Sacred Destinations.) Eventually, with the help of a Jewish family, he becomes a wealthy moneylender and financier. He is a good man, and finds a way to stay true to himself even as he is forced unwillingly to marry the king's ward and become a nobleman. In this position, he cleverly finds a legal way to free the peasants from the many exploitive laws which prevent them from earning a living as free men. He avenges his father's humiliation and death without undue cruelty - but the small mercy that he shows comes back to haunt him as the enemies of his family nearly succeed in destroying him. Some turns of plot are so positive that one questions their probability; but other events balance this out with all-too-realistic negative endings. It w

A wonderful story about Catalonia and the Catalan people

I grew up in Barcelona and went many, many times to the church of Santa Maria del Mar. This book is a wonderful story about medieval Catalonia, key to understand why Barcelona is what it is today and why Catalans are not really Spaniards, despite 500 years of Castilian influence. I read the Catalan and English versions and they are both wonderful. I hope Ildefonso will write the next book directly in Catalan.

De lo mejor que he leido

Si buscan un gran libro, que entretenga, te emocione (sobre todo si tienes hijos), y quieras guardar en casa para un futuro, este es el libro que debes tener. Tus hijos disfrutarán de él dentro de muchos años. La historia te mantiene todo el tiempo y no eres capaz de dejarlo. Es un libro para releer cada 2-3 años y recordar como era la vida antes de cualquier tecnología. La fe de las personas movía el Mundo en esa época, y hemos llegado hasta hoy gracias a gente como la que construía catedrales como la del libro.

Worthy of 5

In 14th Century Spain, socially chained to the regimens of nobility and a single faith, a boy is left to die. Rescued, cast off, humiliated, deceived, befriended, the boy and the man he becomes struggles for independence and freedom. Life is starkly brutal, sprinkled by boundless acts of kindness and generosity, and flashes of love. The novel delivers a gut wrenching blow time and time again. Ideal for readers with a passion for history and well schemed human drama.