A young man comes of age and crosses continents in search of an identity―and a cause―at the dawn of the Spanish Civil War in a thrilling, timely, and emotional historical saga.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Simon Tolkien’s The Palace at the End of the Sea, which is out June 1st 2025.
New York City, 1929. Young Theo Sterling’s world begins to unravel as the Great Depression exerts its icy grip. He finds it hard to relate to his parents: His father, a Jewish self-made businessman, refuses to give up on the American dream, and his mother, a refugee from religious persecution in Mexico, holds fast to her Catholic faith. When disaster strikes the family, Theo must learn who he is. A charismatic school friend and a firebrand girl inspire him to believe he can fight Fascism and change the world, but each rebellion comes at a higher price, forcing Theo to question these ideologies too.
From New York’s Lower East Side to an English boarding school to an Andalusian village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Theo’s harrowing journey from boy to man is set against a backdrop of societies torn apart from within, teetering on the edge of a terrible war to which Theo is compulsively drawn like a moth to a flame.
Text copyright © 2025 by Simon Tolkien, Published by Lake Union Publishing
Straightaway, Theo realized that this was a man in love with the sound of his own voice. It rose and fell, amplified to booming decibels by the loudspeakers, as Mosley switched from mourning the sacrifice of the soldiers who had fought in the Great War to unleashing his rage on the politicians who had betrayed them. He punched the air with his hand, and the floodlights picked out his rolling eyes and gleaming teeth and the flashing silver of his belt buckle against the black silk of his shirt. And then, as he paused for effect, the interruptions began.
The first was high up in a gallery near the back of the hall. It was indistinct to begin with, but then Theo caught it:
Hitler and Mosley, hunger and war.
It was the same chant as outside, but thin and ragged here in the great cavern of the auditorium. Mosley could have drowned them out if he chose, but instead he stopped his speech in mid-flow and the arc lights swung their beams up toward the disturbance, picking out a group of stewards who were attacking several protesters, while other Blackshirts were leaping across the chairs to join them. After a few moments the stewards manhandled the protesters to the nearest staircase exit and threw them out. There was a scream followed by a shocked silence, and Mosley began speaking again as if nothing had happened.
Four minutes later the protest was repeated, eliciting precisely the same response. And so the preplanned interruptions continued, erupting one after the other in different parts of the hall, and each time Mosley stopped, arms akimbo as he waited until his men had done their work under the blue-gray glare of the spotlights.
Now two young men and a girl rose up from their seats in the central stalls less than fifty yards from where Theo and Esmond were sitting. Theo could see the fear on their faces but the determination too. They had their arms around each other, supporting each other to stand, as they shouted, “Fascism is murder!” and “Down with Mosley!”
The girl was beautiful, with high cheeks and almond-shaped eyes and blond hair cascading down over her shoulders, and she was wearing an evening gown with blue flowers on a white background. Theo thought she must have dressed up to avoid suspicion, and his awareness of her planning made him feel connected to her, as if he knew her and they weren’t strangers. She was so delicate and he wanted to reach out and push her back down out of sight before the stewards came, but he couldn’t.
In a moment the girl and her two friends were surrounded and down on the floor, invisible as the Blackshirts pummeled them with their fists and kicked them with their boots. And then they were on the move again, carrying their victims away. Theo caught sight of the girl with her pretty dress half torn off and her head forced back by the pressure of the stewards’ hands. It was appalling. He had to help her. He got up from his chair but immediately felt himself being pulled back down, and Esmond’s mouth was at his ear again:
“Damn you, Theo! Stay in your seat! You agreed to wait. You can’t back out now.”
Theo closed his eyes and breathed. Esmond was right. He had to stay. But what was Esmond accusing him of? Trying to run because he was a coward, or trying to intervene to help the girl because he was brave? Which was it? He couldn’t answer, but then he realized he wanted to do both, and so both were true.
He opened his eyes and the girl was gone, but he remembered her completely even though he’d seen her for less than a minute, and her eager face would remain imprinted on his memory for the rest of his life, not fading like his father’s or others’ that he loved and lost. He would remember her with an infinite sadness, as if he’d missed something that he knew he would never find again, and he honored her memory with a determination to stand up and be brave, whatever the cost.
There was pandemonium all around him. Chairs were flying through the air and people were screaming and heading for the exits and Mosley was shouting at them through the loudspeakers: “Keep your seats! Please keep your seats!”
His appeals had some effect, but it was the shift of the arc lights that really put a stop to the chaos. They were shining upward now, picking out a man who was clambering across the forest of iron girders that held up the great glazed roof one hundred and fifty feet above the audience down below. Five Blackshirts were up there, too, but they were hesitant in their pursuit, clearly frightened that they would fall. The man looked back at them contemptuously and shouted, “Down with Fascism!” and then pulled himself up acrobatically onto a higher platform out of sight, and the lights swung back to Mosley.
He was ranting about the Jews. “European ghettos are pouring their dregs into our great country. The dregs of humanity—you know who I am referring to!” he roared, and Esmond pulled Theo’s arm and got to his feet.
“Down with Fascism!” he yelled, echoing the man in the roof, and Theo realized he was shouting too. At least he could hear a voice that sounded like his. And once he’d started, he couldn’t stop. “Fascism is murder!” he cried. “They’re murdering the Jews; they’ll murder us all if we let them.” He wasn’t aware of his body or of Esmond, only his voice crying out in the wilderness, until he felt the blows coming and shrank into a ball, curling himself fetus-like on the hard floor as the stewards kicked him with their heavy boots. Then he felt their foul hands pulling him up and he couldn’t resist as they twisted his arms behind his back, starting a new exquisite pain that he would have done anything to stop, but which was replaced with something new and even more terrible when they reached the top of the metal stairs and flung him down into the outer corridor, where more of them were waiting to administer a final crescendo of punishment before they finally threw him out into the street.
