Soldiers of Salamis

Soldiers of Salamis (Spanish: Soldados de Salamina) is a novel about the Spanish Civil War published in 2001 by Spanish author Javier Cercas. The book was acclaimed by critics in Spain and was top of the best-seller book list there for many months. A film adaptation Soldados de Salamina was released in 2003. The English translation by Anne McLean won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2004.

The book's title is a metaphorical allusion to the famous Battle of Salamis in which the Athenian fleet defeated the Persians. It is composed in a mixture of fact and fiction, which is something of a speciality of the author.

Soldiers of Salamis has sometimes been viewed in the context of a national debate in the first decade of the twenty-first century about how the Spanish Civil War should be commemorated. The year 2000 saw the foundation of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory which grew out of the quest by a sociologist, Emilio Silva-Barrera, to locate and identify the remains of his grandfather, who was shot by Franco's forces in 1936. In the political arena, the Law of Historical Memory of 2007 attempted to move on from the pact of forgetting adopted by the Spanish at the time of the transition to democracy. Cercas thinks many Spanish people of his generation have been reluctant to write about the Civil War (which was experienced directly by their grandparents' generation). However, he views the pact of forgetting as a mainly political construct, given the fact that some books and films about the Civil War were produced despite the influence of the pact.

The novel is divided into three sections. The first and third section depict the historical investigation of a fictional Javier Cercas into the life of the fascist Rafael Sánchez Mazas. The second section is a biographical retelling of Mazas's life.