Saragossa

The sixth volume of Galdos’s Episodios Nacionales returns to the young narrator Gabriel de Araceli, now caught inside one of the fiercest episodes of Spain’s war against Napoleon. The setting is the second siege of Zaragoza in 1808 and 1809, where ordinary citizens, soldiers, and clergy held out street by street against the French army under conditions of near-total ruin. Galdos builds the story around the stubborn patriot Don Jose de Montoria and his household, weaving a doomed love and a family’s fortunes into the wider catastrophe. Hunger, typhus, and bombardment do as much damage as the guns. Written in 1874, it turns a national legend of resistance into something human and closely observed. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.