How Spanish writer's novel about Eta terror campaign became global hit

As HBO series based on Fernando Aramburu's Patria begins, author says his goal was to document a shared horror

Towards the end of Patria, Fernando Aramburu's sprawling examination of the human cost of Eta's four-decade-long terror campaign, a character attends a talk by an author who, as it happens, has written a testimony to the atrocities" and their enduring consequences.

While he suspects the writer's heart is probably in the right place, he reckons nothing will really change because someone's written a book. So far, it seemed to him, Basque writers hadn't paid very much attention to the victims of terrorism. They were more interested in the killers, their crises of conscience, their emotional backstories - all that stuff".