Ángeles González-Sinde

A ghost story with a basis in truth: the unhealed wound of a country that has failed to grant peace to all its dead.

Nieves has spent a couple of years working as a country doctor in a small provincial town, where the locals—wary of outsiders—still see her as a foreigner. One day, the primary school teacher calls for her help concerning the strange behavior of one of her students: Micaela experiences brief moments where she loses touch with her surroundings, haunted by sudden terrors she cannot bring herself to speak about.

With no clear diagnosis following medical tests, Nieves decides to treat Micaela during her off-hours, inviting her over in the afternoons to share a snack and draw together. In her drawings, some of the girl's unnamed fears begin to take shape. Remarkably, they point to events she couldn't possibly know about—events that, as Nieves begins to unravel, trace back to a bloody episode during the harshest era of Francoist repression: a night in 1947 silenced by an ominous code of omertà, one that no one in town is willing to talk about.

A exquisite novel that explores how trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, like a kind of "original sin" chaining us to a past that must be unearthed.