The Heretics

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Written in 1946 and now translated for the first time in Spain, *The Heretics* are two novels in one, a surprising literary exercise about the intransigence of fanaticism that transcends the limits of the genre in both form and substance. Through his peculiar narrative structure, Humphrey Slater, a British communist who fought in the International Brigades and whose time in the Spanish Civil War was the cause of his disillusionment with communism, portrays and conveys two key historical moments in the rise of totalitarianism - religious and political - and the consequences of fanaticism. The first, between 1197 and 1212, in Avignon, a dark time of fanaticism and religious persecution. The second, in the Spanish civil war, between 1936 and 1939, characterized by political sectarianism.