The Return

Sonia Norton’s life in London has stalled. Her relationship is over, her work feels hollow, and a letter from her flamenco teacher sends her to Granada — to stay with a family friend and immerse herself in learning the dance that her teacher, now elderly and ill, says will be better understood in Andalusia than anywhere else.

In Granada, she finds a box of photographs and letters belonging to the family with whom she is staying — the Ramirez family. The photographs take her back to the 1930s, to the years just before the civil war and through it: a brother and sister who found themselves on opposite sides, a love story destroyed by the politics of the Republic and the Nationalist uprising, the specific violence of a city where everyone knew everyone and the killing was personal.

The Return alternates between Sonia’s present-day Granada — its Alhambra, its Sacromonte caves, its flamenco bars, its particular quality of evening light — and the story the photographs reveal. Hislop uses the same dual-timeline structure that she found for The Island and would use across her career: a contemporary figure discovers a historical story, and the two illuminate each other.

Reading Guides

• Victoria Hislop Books in Order
• Where to Start with Victoria Hislop
• Books About Spain

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Return apart: Granada is beautifully rendered — the Alhambra, the Sacromonte caves, the barrios; The Spanish Civil War material is emotionally powerful; and The flamenco thread gives the novel its pulse and rhythm. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Return give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The Spanish Civil War’s lasting presence in the cultural memory of Granada. Flamenco as a form of collective grief and survival. The family saga as Hislop’s characteristic form. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Victoria Hislop’s prose in The Return is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The present-day framing is less compelling than the 1930s sections. The romance plot is conventional. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers visiting Granada and Andalusia; fans of Spanish history and culture; Hislop readers

The Spanish Civil War in Granada

Granada was one of the cities most immediately and brutally affected by the Nationalist uprising of July 1936. The city fell to Franco’s forces within days, and the repression that followed was savage: thousands of Republicans were shot in the weeks and months after the takeover, their bodies buried in mass graves that are still being excavated. The poet Federico García Lorca — Granada’s most famous son — was among those killed, taken from his hiding place and shot on August 19, 1936. His remains have never been definitively identified.

Hislop’s novel is set against this specific history. The Ramirez family whose letters Sonia discovers were caught in the violence that divided not just Spain but every family in a city where everyone knew everyone and the killing was personal. The brother and sister on opposite sides of the conflict — a division that the civil war made both common and deadly — embody the tragedy of a conflict in which political allegiance could determine whether you lived or died.

Flamenco as Historical Memory

The choice of flamenco as the novel’s structural thread is not accidental. Flamenco, which emerged from the Andalusian communities of the Romani, Jewish, and Moorish populations, has historically expressed grief — the duende that Federico García Lorca described as the spirit of death and desire that animates authentic flamenco. In The Return, Hislop uses the dance as a form of embodied historical memory: what cannot be said can be expressed through movement, and Sonia’s learning of flamenco is simultaneously her learning of what happened in the 1930s.

The Sacromonte caves — the traditional home of Granada’s flamenco culture — appear in the novel as both historical site and living tradition, and Hislop’s portrait of flamenco’s social function is among the most sustained in English-language fiction.

Hislop’s Andalusia

The Return was Hislop’s second novel, following The Island, and it confirmed that her method — a contemporary figure uncovering a historical story through physical objects and documents — was not a one-off device but a repeatable form. The structure allows her to render historical research as narrative discovery, so that the reader’s experience of learning what happened in the 1930s mirrors the protagonist’s experience of the same discovery.

Granada itself — the Alhambra, the Generalife gardens, the Albaicín quarter — is rendered with the specific attentiveness that Hislop brings to all her Mediterranean settings, and the novel functions, among its other purposes, as a portrait of the city that readers visiting it will find useful and moving.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A vivid Granada novel that uses flamenco and the Spanish Civil War to explore how historical violence shapes the lives of those who survive it.