Barcelona, 1976: Hired gunmen brutally murder a lifelong friend and fellow anarchist, forcing Farquhar McHarg into a race to document an epic history before he too can be silenced. The first volume of his memoirs finds him a Glasgow boy, dropped by chance into Barcelona’s revolutionary underworld at the tail end of the great imperialist war of 1914–1918, recruited by Spanish anarchists to act as a go-between with Britain’s Secret Service Bureau. McHarg tells of a corrupt and brutal Spanish regime, bent on bringing a rebellious working class back under its heel, and the generous and recklessly idealistic men and women who struggled to transform it after rejecting traditional party politics.

Pistoleros! is a thrilling tale of intrigue and romance, and a sweeping inside view of the saboteurs and spies, the capitalists and bold insurrectionaries of Spain’s bloody past.