An American boy with impossible dreams is thrust into the cauldron of the Spanish Civil War in this arresting and thrilling historical coming-of-age epic and sequel to The Palace at the End of the Sea.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Simon Tolkien’s The Room of Lost Steps, which releases on September 16th 2025.
Barcelona 1936. Theo helps the Anarchist workers defeat the army that is trying to overthrow the democratically elected government, and he is reunited with his true love, Maria. But all too soon, his joy turns to terror as the Anarchists turn on him, led by a rival for Maria’s affection.
Lucky to escape with his life, Theo returns to England to study at Oxford. But his heart is in Spain, now torn apart by a bloody civil war, and he is quick to abandon his new life when his old schoolmate Esmond offers him the chance to fight the Fascists. He is unprepared for the nightmare of war that crushes his spirit and his hope until, back in Barcelona, Theo is confronted with a final terrible choice that will define his life forever.
As Theo’s tumultuous coming-of-age journey reaches its end, can his dream to change the world—so far from home—still hold true?
He was running through the trees, and men were falling all around him. Falling in all kinds of ways—onto their knees, onto their backs, twirling and twisting in death-dance pirouettes as the machine-gun bullets spun them around like hanging targets at a shooting range.
There was a noise in his ears that sounded like the cracking of a thousand whips mixed up with shouts and screams, but he was separated from it. He ran and that was all. With his head still and upright and his knees pushed up high to lengthen his stride just as he’d been taught, and with his boots slipping on the wet ground, and the air sharp and acrid in his lungs. Running with the same power he’d always had, propelling him forward from inside, until he fell.
He scrambled to his feet and crashed over again almost immediately, this time tumbling head over heels. He must have passed out because the next he knew, he was on his back, looking up, and the sky was rushing past, and it stopped, swinging back into place, only when he bent to the side and was violently sick. Everything hurt, especially his head, but it felt like hard bruising—a sensation he knew well from past falls on cinder tracks and rugby fields—and not the weakness and burning pain he imagined he’d feel if he was shot. Looking down, he could see no blood turning his muddy uniform from gray to red.
What had happened, then? What had sent him sprawling if it wasn’t a bullet? He looked around and saw the culprits on all sides—gnarled, knotted vines protruding from the earth like the agonized, clawing hands of men buried alive underneath. He was lying on the edge of a vineyard planted in a hollow of the land that had been invisible from the trench behind him. Two hundred yards ahead, the ground rose steeply up the bare slope to the Fascist line.
Bare because none of the Lincolns had got that far. Without the support they’d been promised, they hadn’t stood a chance of success. Not even one in a million. The sheer monstrous stupidity of the attack took Theo’s breath away.
The noonday sun had burned off the morning mist, and he could see the snouts of guns poking out from the sandbag parapets along the ridge, with clouds of firing smoke rising above them into the still air, but there were no faces. The enemy he’d come to fight was completely invisible. He aimed his rifle at them anyway and fired, but the bolt jammed when he tried to pull it back and a volley of bullets arrived in immediate response, spattering the earth close to where he was kneeling. He threw himself flat on the ground, not moving a muscle, and his prayers were answered when no more bullets followed.
For now, he’d deceived the sniper up on the ridge into thinking he was dead, but he knew he wouldn’t be so lucky if the sniper realized his mistake. He trembled, picturing the man with his merciless eye glued to the telescopic sight of his rifle and his finger ready to squeeze the trigger as soon as he detected even the slightest movement down below. The bullets traveling with such awful speed and precision through the air. Tears filled Theo’s eyes as he realized he’d evacuated his bowels.
He needed cover to survive. The pruned-down vines were useless, and the splintered olive trees behind him were now just thin sticks of blackened wood. Digging was impossible: even if he could raise enough earth with his hands and bayonet, he knew he’d attract the sniper’s attention long before he had a barrier high enough to hide behind. But without protection, it would be only a matter of time before he was hit by one of the enemy machine guns that continued to methodically traverse no-man’s-land, cutting down everyone and everything in their path.
Very slowly, he turned his head, searching the blasted landscape all around. Men dying, men dead, but he could see nothing that would provide a meaningful shield, until he took the risk of rolling onto his side to look directly behind him into the olive grove and saw a soldier sprawled face up with a bulging pack under his body, keeping him off the ground. Theo recognized him. It was Tiny, the fat boy in the long johns, who’d become so distressed when he couldn’t find a uniform to fit him in the clothes room at Albacete the day before. And now here he was again, looking exactly like an upended tortoise. But one whose crawling days were over. Tiny’s splayed-out limbs didn’t move when the gunfire plowed up the earth around where he was lying. He had to be dead.
How could he have gone over the top like that? Bent over like a railway porter under all that useless equipment. It beggared belief. Couldn’t someone have told him to leave his pack behind?
Theo dismissed the thought. Tiny the person wasn’t his concern. All that mattered was that Tiny’s body and pack made a good-size mound he could hide behind. If he could reach him without getting shot. He put his hand up to the pouch around his neck, feeling the rosary beads through the thin cotton as he measured the distance. Twenty yards, maybe less, ten strides on a cinder track, but this was a different terrain, and he couldn’t afford to fall.
He breathed in deeply once, twice, three times, and then pushed himself violently up off the ground and ran, leaving his rifle behind. He leaped over Tiny’s body and landed on the other side with his heart hammering inside his chest. To his surprise, there were no bullets this time. Perhaps the sniper had moved or gone to the latrine or done something else entirely arbitrary that determined which of the Lincolns down below would live or die that day.
Theo was panting and Tiny was looking at him. Or rather through him. Tiny wasn’t dead, because his big, hazel-colored eyes blinked slowly every few seconds, but they were indifferent, lost in a limbo world somewhere between life and death. Halfway across the Styx. Theo reached up to hold Tiny’s hand, but there was no answering pressure, and as he watched, the eyes glazed over and whatever had been behind them went away. To where? Theo had no idea. Probably nowhere. That was what made the most sense, whatever the believers had to say. He’d never been this close to death before. It was so mysterious and yet so simple and matter-of-fact. It terrified him, how it just happened.
He pushed Tiny’s body over on its side so that his head was facing the enemy. He couldn’t stand to look into his empty eyes anymore. But as he did so, he caught sight of a folded-over piece of paper on the ground that must have fallen out of Tiny’s pack or his open breast pocket. He opened it up and read it.
It was a scrawled letter, written clearly in haste and probably unfinished, because there was no name at the end:
Sweetheart,
We’re going into battle soon and I just want you to know that I love you a hell of a lot. It would’ve been swell to be with you always, but I think maybe it’s not going to work out that way now. And if that’s what happens, I don’t want you to wither away like a flower without rain. I want you to love and be loved. That’s what you deserve.
I’m not sorry I came. You have to understand that. We have to fight back. We have to
Theo cried. It was just so damned unfair. That this boy should have left everything behind, including his girl, to cross the world for an ideal, only to be shoved inside a cattle truck and sent over the top with no training. Not even enough to know to take his pack off before he went up the ladder. Into a hail of bullets. Did no one care? Would no one be held responsible?
Two machine-gun bullets thudded into Tiny’s side, as if in response, and his body absorbed them like a sandbag. “More full of lead than a drainpipe!” The phrase floated into Theo’s exhausted brain from somewhere he couldn’t remember and repeated itself like a stone rattling around in an empty oil drum. Its absurdity made him want to laugh as well as cry. He was fast reaching the end of his tether.
He looked up and saw a soldier walking close to him through the olive trees. Slowly, as if he was taking the air on a Sunday in the country. He had no helmet and no rifle, and his tousled, wheat-blond hair was the color of his uniform. Theo thought of Galahad in the book Andrew had given him long ago. Inviolate. A vision. And then a mortar shell landed, sending up a momentary geyser of black earth and dust, as if it was another tree. When the dust cleared, the soldier was gone.
Excerpt from THE ROOM OF LOST STEPS by Simon Tolkien. Text copyright © 2025 by Simon Tolkien, Published by Lake Union Publishing
