Jonathan Gallardo

Jonathan has been an orphan since the age of three. He is an unusual kid — quiet and self-absorbed in some ways, but violent and ill-tempered in others. One day he slips halfway through a street fight and is repeatedly kicked in the head. From this time on he is beset by the strangest of conditions: he can hear voices near places where crimes and misdeeds have been committed in the historical past.... JONATHAN GALLARDO, M. G. Sanchez’s third novel, is one of those books that defy generic classification....On one level it is the story of a working-class Gibraltarian kid striving to improve his lot in life ... but at the same time it is an exploration of Gibraltar's largely forgotten colonial history – or what the narrator of the novel at one point describes as ‘an unrecorded history of division and conflict that wasn't supposed to exist but which nonetheless oozes like spectral mould out of Gibraltar’s crumbling ancient walls.’