Vuelta Skelter

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Tim Moore completes his epic (and ill-advised) trilogy of cycling's Grand Tours.

Julian Berrendero's victory in the 1941 Vuelta a Espana was an extraordinary exercise in sporting redemption: the Spanish cyclist had just spent 18 months in Franco's concentration camps, punishment for expressing Republican sympathies during the civil war. Seventy nine years later, perennially over-ambitious cyclo-adventurer Tim Moore developed a fascination with Berrendero's story, and having borrowed an old road bike with the great man's name plastered all over it, set off to retrace the 4,409km route of his 1941 triumph - in the midst of a global pandemic.

What follows is a tale of brutal heat and lonely roads, of glory, humiliation, and then a bit more humiliation. Along the way Tim recounts the civil war's still-vivid tragedies, and finds the gregarious but impressively responsible locals torn between welcoming their nation's only foreign visitor, and bundling him and his filthy bike into a vat of antiviral gel.

© Tim Moore 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

  • Vuelta Skelter is really three books in one. It’s the story of Moore’s own epic 2,760-mile, lung-busting, thigh-wrenching journey… It is a rich, kaleidoscopic look a the legacy of the Spanish Civil War… And it is also a tribute to Berrendero – a tough, dour loner who refuses to give an inch, either to the mountains or to the authorities… Moore wants to restore JB [Berrendero] to his proper place in the ranks of cycling legends. He succeeds superbly.

    Daily Mail, *Book of the Week*

  • Marvellous

    Road.cc

  • Reading Tim Moore is a joy… you will belly laugh at the bedraggled, gazpacho-guzzling figure Moore cuts in Vuelta Skelter… he emerges as a two-wheeled Groucho Marx and a thoughtful Simon Schama combined.

    Cycle

  • Vuelta Skelter‘s style is colloquial, full of jokes… the narrative races along like Berrendero on a good day… a valuable portrait of those post-war years of murder and hunger, and the modern Spain that still hardly dares mention them.

    Times Literary Supplement

  • Vuelta Skelter…[is] his best cycling book yet. The mixture of the hilarious and the harrowing really shouldn’t work but, in the hands of a writer as skilled as Moore, it deftly combines his trademark mischievous wit and a love of cycling.

    Cycling Plus

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