but now they're all back. Every room in the house is taken and Eliza finds herself sharing her bed with her eldest daughter and her daughter's pug. Combined with the online course she's trying to finish, plus her job to fit in, there just isn't the peace and quiet that Eliza needs.So when an ad pops up on her laptop saying 'house-sitters wanted', Eliza can't resist the chance to escape. She ends up moving to a rural finca in southern Spain, looking after the owner's Iberico pigs, learning about secret gastronomic societies... and finding a new zest for life and love along the way. Praise for Jo Thomas :'Rich, warm and sunny. A story that stays with you long after the last page is turned' Milly Johnson'Like the very best kind of holiday' Lucy Diamond

    Eventually, Philip would prove himself in his own right even though he turned out to be a much different ruler than his father. He won a life or death struggle against a resurgent Ottoman Empire, he consolidated Spanish dominion in the Americas, and he fought to maintain Spanish holdings in Europe. He also used a ruthless Spanish Inquisition in order to keep his subjects in line with his own version of the Catholic faith.Even now, the legacy of this powerful ruler is being sorted out. As such, some are beginning to change their long hardened views of the monarch, and new aspects of his dynamic and complicated life are starting to come forth. Read for yourself the life, the legacy, and the unbridled achievement of this colossal potentate—King Philip II of Spain.

    

    

    

    His published work is now complete with Sentimental Songs, his collection of poetry. Written between 1923 and 1987 (thus predating and postdating his novels), these poems represent a lifetime's reflections and personal experiences. Unlike the novels, the poems were written in Alfau's native tongue of Spanish and look back to classic Spanish poetry of late nineteenth century. But like his novels, the mocking note of parody is frequently heard. As translator Ilan Stavans writes in his introduction, Sentimental Songs "is a rebuttal of Romanticism, but it emerges from the very ranks of the Romantic movement and its sense of life." This is a bilingual edition, with Alfau's Spanish facing Stavans's English translations (made in consultation with the author). A substantial introduction places the poems in the context of Alfau's fiction and in the larger context of Spanish poetry in general.