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 …