The Boy Who Sailed To Spain

ISBN-13: 9788460892601 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 114 str.

Paul Ogarra

Opis

Set in North Africa and Spain in 2015. Masuhun´s family have been Christians since before Islam was born, since the time of Augustine of Hippo and the presence of the Romans. They live in North Africa where he follows his father´s every footstep loving him and his company at every opportunity. Till one day after the celebration of house mass, in the night hooded men come to their home. In spite of the boy´s reckless intervention, they brutally slay his father, Afra. The tribe comes belatedly to the house to protect them but Masuhun runs amok once he recovers consciousness, screaming accusing them of cowardice and that they wanted his father dead. On his deathbed Afra charges the boy with going to the stone, in Europe, on which stand the Mother and Child. There to implore her to once again succour their people as she has done through the millennia in times of persecution and slaughter. The next morning as the sun rises, the distraught boy prepares his tiny craft, with the reluctant aid of an old friend of his father who guards the boats. They launch him into perilous seas where a heavy levanter is blowing. The boy´s personality starts to show itself, first disposing of an unwanted but quite charming would be stowaway. Much later in heavy seas the night comes, to his great desperation. Tied to the mast for survival, he is rescued by a Gibraltarian tugboat. He arrives in Spain at El Coto Doñana and starts to follow his road in the finding of The Mother and Child. His meeting with an ancient hooded nun at the historical town of Jimena de La Frontera gives him the knowledge that all that has happened so far is by no means fortuitous. Her subsequently inexplicable disappearance leaves him stranded and without papers, roofless and hungry in the centre of Andalucía. His adventures continue, meeting evil people and good, being chased by ruthless killers for reasons he cannot understand. Finally the Spanish Para-military police the Guardia Civil also begin to conduct a national manhunt for the boy Entwined in the story is the Spain of the year seven eleven. The Berber general Tariq defeats the Visigoth king and the rule of the caliphate of Al Andaluz begins. In 1309 the Spanish king Ferdinand embarks on the recapture of Spain, conquers Gibraltar, and our story begins. Masuhun ever faithful to his father´s memory continues his quest now with the help of two children he be-friends, and their families and colleagues. The military and Special Forces backgrounds of his new allies come at the moment when he needs miracles to assist him carrying out his father´s desires. His dreams and the people he has met along the road slowly start to show him that faith does move mountains. He finds that all the evils that are sent to beset him as he travels, are but snares. That it will only be by using his faith and his mystic guides that he will tread the path of the righteous and follow his road to a destination for reasons and in more ways than the ones he had believed were the only motives for his journey. As the story climaxes Masuhun and his friends run up against unassailable opposition, and also receive help in the most dramatic and unexpected way. This is a story of a boy who is forced to become a man and to choose the right path on the road to the unknown and unexpected destination to which he is guided. It´s a story about evil and how in the world he discovers, he, as all young people really do need help and guidance in the avoidance of it as it besets him constantly in its every guise and at every turn on practically each day of his young life. How at the end of the day there is only one direction in which he can turn to choose the right road out of the many offered to him in his daily life by agents of evil clothed ingeniously as all sorts in the world he finds unfolding before him.