Discovering the heartbreak of flamenco inspired bestselling author Victoria Hislop to weave a tale of love and loss in the Spanish Civil War.

After Victoria Hislop stumbled across a former leper colony while on holiday in Greece, she turned the experience into her debut novel, The Island. It sold over a million copies and led to Victoria being named the Newcomer of the Year at the Galaxy British Book Awards last year.

It is a hard act to follow but Victoria has managed it easily with her second novel, The Return. Set against a backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, it tells the tale of a beautiful young dancer, Mercedes, whose passion for flamenco stays with her as the conflict tears her away from her family, her hometown of Granada and the gypsy guitarist who stole her heart. Crossing as many decades as it does international boundaries, The Return weaves together Spain’s past and present and shows how the events of seventy years ago can echo down time and still effect one family’s life today. 

While The Island came about almost as a happy accident, the inspiration for The Return was much more deliberate. Before she was a best-selling novelist, Victoria worked as a journalist and had landed the happy task of going to Granada to learn how to salsa for the Sunday Telegraph. The trip sparked a lasting interest in dance, which prompted her to return to Granada under her own steam and try flamenco lessons.

“Flamenco is a completely different experience to salsa,” she explains from the home in Kent she shares with her husband, the Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, and their two children. “It’s very much harder and I think you do need a lifetime to learn flamenco. You have to start as soon as your bones are solid enough and then you have to keep going until they crumble.”
Victoria’s first taste of flamenco had been at tourist shows in Barcelona and they nearly killed her interest there and then. Fortunately, the genuine article is not in short supply in Granada’s cuevas.

“The worst stuff is the audience participation flamenco,” swears Victoria. “It’s the sort of thing that puts people off flamenco. Granada is full of the real places. They are dark, dingy and atmospheric. When you see the real thing it is so different that you just know it is authentic.”
The author took lessons at La Mariquilla dance school on Granada’s Calle Carcel Alta. The school is named after the stage name of María Guardia Gómez, one of flamenco’s most famous dancers. In a strange twist of fate, Victoria ended up dancing in La Mariquilla’s own purple suede shoes, as they were the only flamenco shoes the school had that fitted Victoria’s dainty size three feet. It was during these classes that Victoria was struck by the idea that she should place flamenco at the heart of her next novel.

“Flamenco is very primitive and, unlike most dance which is an expression of joy, it’s not about happiness. There is something about flamenco that reaches deep inside. It’s anguished. It’s about heartbreak. There is something so intense about it that appeals to me and I wanted to try and capture that emotion in a fictionalised form.”

Read Johnathan Trew's full article in our July 2008 edition.