The peninsula with the empty houses

The book has been honored with numerous awards, including the Premio Calamo Libro del Año 2024, Premio Andalucia de la Critica 2025, Premio Andalucia de las Letras 2025, and Premio Dulce Chacon 2025.

The story of a family’s dissolution, a people’s inhumane treatment, a country’s decay, and a peninsula with empty houses.

The story of a soldier who rips open his skin to let out accumulated ash, a poet who stitches the shadow of a girl after a bombing, and a teacher who teaches his students how to play dead. Of a general who sleeps next to the severed hand of a saint, a blind child who regains his sight during a blackout, and a village woman who paints all the trees in her garden black. Of a foreign photographer who steps on a landmine near Brunete and doesn't lift his foot for forty years, a resident of Guernica who drives a van with the smoky debris of an airstrike to the center of Paris, and a wounded dog whose blood will stain the last stripe of an abandoned Badajoz flag.

Here, then, is the story of the Spanish Civil War and a dying Iberia, where the fantastic mirrors the cruelty of the real; where the destinies of an entire generation of olive growers from Jaén intersect with those of Alberti, Lorca, and Unamuno; of Rodoreda, Zambrano, and Kent; of Hemingway, Orwell, and Bernanos; of Picasso and Ortega y Gasset; of Azaña and Franco; where the epic and the ethnographic intertwine to create a magnificent tapestry, poetic and grotesque, beautiful and delirious.

The film adaptation of the book is in preparation.