A COMPLETE NOVEL ABOUT THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR IN THE KEY OF MAGICAL REALISM
Cálamo Book of the Year Award 2024
Andalucía Critics Award
This is the story of the decay of a family, the dehumanization of a people, the disintegration of a territory, and a peninsula full of empty houses.
The story of a soldier who opens his skin to release the accumulated ash; of a poet who sews the shadow of a girl after a bombing; of a teacher who teaches his students to fake death. That of a general who sleeps next to the severed hand of a saint; of a blind boy who regains his sight during a blackout; of a peasant woman who paints the trees in her orchard black. That of a foreign photographer who steps on a mine near Brunete and doesn’t lift his foot for forty years; of a resident of Gernika who drives a truck loaded with smoldering remains of an air raid to the center of Paris; and that of a wounded dog whose blood stains the last stripe of a flag abandoned in Badajoz.
La península de las casas vacías is a complete story of the Spanish Civil War and a dying Iberia where the fantastic intensifies the harshness of reality. A choral narrative in which the anonymous members of an olive-growing clan from the Jándula cross paths with Alberti, Lorca, and Unamuno; Rodoreda, Zambrano, and Kent; Hemingway, Orwell, and Bernanos; Picasso and Maruja Mallo; Azaña and Foxá. A novel where the epic and the everyday intertwine to weave an overflowing, poetic, and grotesque tapestry, beautiful and delirious.
