The Room of Lost Steps by Simon Tolkien

Lake Union. 2025. 379 pages.

Simon Tolkien trained as an attorney and practiced law before he turned to the profession that made his grandfather famous. Thanks to his background in legal matters, he started writing courtroom dramas and has since turned to historical fiction. Tolkien’s latest series takes place just before and during the Spanish Civil War. Set in Spain and England, The Room of Lost Steps is the second in this duology. Tolkien brings 1930s Spain alive and shows the complicated relationship between the Anarchists and the Communists, both determined to fight the Fascists.

Theo Sterling is the hero of the series. In the first book, The Palace at the End of the Sea, he leaves New York for England and Spain after his father dies. He is an empathetic character who cares for his widowed mother, Elena, and tries to warm up to his new stepfather, Andrew. In The Room of Lost Steps, Theo searches for Maria, the Spanish Anarchist he fell in love with in the first book. To get closer to her, he gets involved in the civil war and joins an American battalion to fight the Fascists. Many of the characters that made this first book stand out appear again throughout The Room of Lost Steps, sometimes in unexpected places.

When Theo returns to Oxford after seeing more fighting than he could bear, he feels out of place and frustrated by the other students’ theoretical discussions of the war. “In the evenings, he relied on alcohol to blot out his thoughts, but it just made him angry. Alone in the corner of smoke-filled pubs, he listened to his fellow students holding forth about Fascism and Communism and Anarchism until his irritation boiled over and he got unsteadily to his feet, spilling his drink.”

Although the story takes place almost a hundred years ago, many lessons in the book apply to current conflicts and governments. In his author’s note at the end of the book, Tolkien writes that Eric Blair (George Orwell) served in the Spanish Civil War and partly inspired the Theo character. As Tolkien writes of Blair, “No one, in my opinion, told the sad thirties story of utopian belief and bitter disillusionment better than him—a story that is as relevant today as it was then.”

Susan Blumberg-Kason
Hinsdale, Illinois