Customer Reviews
Disappointing!!! - By: Mags., 30 Dec 2008 
I bought this at Heathrow,in something of a hurry, & chose it because of the title & the cover: the picture on the front & the reviews on the back. I was drawnin initially & settled down for an enjoyable read but was soon questioning the plausibility of the plot & the over-use of coincidence. The characters were one-dimensional & unreal whilst many comments & descriptions were repetitive & laboured. I didn't finish the book & gave up when I could no longer bear to read, even one more time, of the heroine's 'threadbare' coat. I read for escapism but always hope to learn something & I enjoy stories about a time & place of which I know very little. Winterin Madrid, however, cannot bear comparison to books such as A Suitable Boy, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Wild Swans etc, all of which I found 'unputdownable' & which I reread at intervals.
Tedious and implausible - By: Chalky, 27 Dec 2008 
I had been tempted to buy this book by the suggestion on the cover that it bore some comparison with the work of Carlos Ruiz Zafon, but I was put off by the negative reviews on Amazon.co.uk. Then my wife bought it, so I had the opportunity to read it anyway. I found it very disappointing. The first three-quarters are very drawn out, with the narrative jumping between characters & time periods, & then the last quarter reads like a tsunami with all sorts of implausible twists & turns. None of the characters have any great appeal, & I don't feel I learned anything of value about Spainin the post-Civil War period.
Profoundly unfulfilling - By: D. Adams, 22 Dec 2008 The comparisons made on the book's cover,in combination with my ignorance of the periodin which it is set, undoubtedly made this novel an intriguing prospect. Through the first one hundred pages, I read with both alacrity & interest, willing to forgive literary shortcomings due to the presence (at this stage) of an ostensibly strong plot.
Unfortunately, however, this strength is not sustained. The lethargy could be less frustrating if Sansom were able to retain engagement through other means, viz. imaginative use of lexicon & syntax, greater delineation of characters, & provision of further insight into contemporary events. Alas, he is patently & painfully unable to do so. Sadly, he appears to afflicted by a compulsion to employ the same vocabulary & phrases with truly frightening frequency, rendering the prose horribly formulaic; cleaves unremittingly to stereotypes, imbuing the work with an irritating banality; & provides only a scintilla of insight (which is particularly perplexing when one considers the length of this book & the fact that, for tens of pages at a time, very little happens, which, one assumes, provides an ideal opportunity for contextual detail).
Although the aforementioned weaknesses are clearly significant, they are relatively minorin comparison to the book's most profound flaw - namely the fact that Sansom treats his readers as if they are five years old. On a number of occasions I felt genuinely insulted by his deeming it necessary to explain things which an individual with even the most rudimentary inferential skills could understand with ease.
It appears that Sansom has arrogated a status as a writer. Dan Brown, Lee Child et al are not talented writers, concentrating primarily on plot & entertainment. However, the effectively self-parodic nature of their work reflects the fact that they will never pretend to be something they are not. Mr Sansom, meanwhile, seems to have endeavoured to reach a literary stratum far above that occupied by the aforementioned authors - & has failed catastrophically.
awful - mills and boon with a good cover - By: Mrs. S. C. Lamb, 16 Dec 2008 the characters are very 2d & has the author ever been to spain?
for instance there is a meeting at which they drink mugs of coffee with powdered milk!in spainin the 30s. i don't think so.
and towards the end our brave hero 'walks down the aisle' - you mean he converted to christianity & had a lovely church wedding - pull the other one!
this may sound picky but why bother to have an editor?in fact did the editor read the book?
Historically good - By: Simon Wells, 12 Oct 2008 
I picked this book up while on tour & read it within a couple of weeks. At first I thought it had potential with the prologue showing the Civil war & focusing on one of the communist soldiers Bernie & then the air raids on London & how the people of London coped with this. However once the character goes to Madrid the plot slows right down & then doesn't seem to pick up again until the end & the plot twist, which I won't ruin for you.
I think the book is worth a read just for the historical value. It does show how bad the civil war wasin Spain & if like me you don't know much about that part of history it does explain a lot.
By far not the best book I have read but still enjoyable
