Ángeles González-Sinde

A ghost story based on true facts: the open wound of a country that has been unable to lay all its dead to rest.

Nieves has been a country doctor for a couple of years in a small provincial town, where the locals, wary of urbanites, still consider her an outsider. One day, the primary school teacher draws her attention to the strange behaviour of a pupil: Micaela experiences brief periods of disconnection from her surroundings in which she is assaulted by sudden terrors. But she is unable to describe them.

There is still no clear diagnosis following a series of medical tests and Nieves decides to treat Micaela in her free time. She invites her to her home in the afternoons for tea and to draw together. In Micaela’s drawings, some of the fears that she cannot express begin to take shape. What is extraordinary is that they refer to events she could not possibly know about, and, as Nieves gradually opens up, they lead back to a bloody incident that occurred during the height of Franco's brutal repression. The events of a night in 1947, suppressed by an ominous code of silence, and that no one in the village wants to talk about.

A highly sensitive novel that explores how traumas can be passed down from one generation to the next, like a kind of “original sin” that chains us to a past that needs to be exposed.