National Literature Prize, Critics’ Prize, International Club of Journalists Award—along with prestigious Italian awards Strega and Lampedusa. Over the last decades, no book in Spain has received so many honors!
The novel begins in 2010 with an official announcement by the Basque nationalist organization ETA of a complete renunciation of armed struggle. A powerful terrorist organization fighting for the independence of the Basque Country, which had spread terror across all of Spain, laid down its weapons—leaving behind hundreds of corpses and tens of thousands of ruined lives. Then the author takes the reader twenty years back, to an unnamed city where a local businessman was killed for refusing to give money to the armed wing of ETA. The story is told about two very similar families of two women who had been close friends since childhood. But in one family the murdered man belonged to them, while in the other family the supposed murderer did. The large-scale epic spans twenty years of life against the backdrop of fierce struggle and unbelievably beautiful landscapes of Spain.