A haunting tale of loss in 1970s Andalucía as a girl searches for the truth about her father’s past, revealing the secrets of her village.
In January 1937 as the coastal village of San Román is about to fall to Nationalist troops during the Spanish Civil War, a brutal double murder takes place in its church. Thirty-five years later as tourism begins a new invasion, 11 year-old Marta opens a suitcase belonging to her dead father and finds in it his diary, a hunting knife and an old photograph of her father as a young soldier standing with a mystery woman.
Marta’s attempts to find out about her father’s past (he died mysteriously seven years earlier) lead her into conflict with her father’s contemporaries, old men now who would rather forget the past. As the diary entries are revealed both to the reader and to Marta in a tensely converging parallel narrative, will the horrors of the past return?
This is a novel about the nature of memory and about loss. The place is central to the book, drawing the reader into the tensions of a village caught between the symbols, superstitions and events of the past and increasing signs of tourism pointing to the future. It explores too the conflict between a nostalgia for, and the idealisation of, that which is lost.