La Deuxième Mort de Ramón Mercader

Awarded the Prix Femina, this anti-Stalinist novel took shape during a stay in The Hague, while Semprun still sat on the central committee of the exiled Spanish Communist Party: “all the scattered elements that had been running through my imagination for several weeks, all these obsessions and dreams crystallized with the suddenness of a silent flash of lightning to form, irrefutably and elaborated down to the smallest detail, the plot.” Through a reimagined account of the life of Ramón Mercader, the NKVD agent who assassinated Trotsky in 1940 — here imagined found “suicided” in his hotel room — Semprun revisits his own past and the events that unfolded between the Spanish Civil War and the death of Stalin.