A novel that follows growth and loneliness, and the border between fantasy and reality, through the eyes of children and young people. Its poetic prose and melancholy tone quietly bring out the atmosphere of place and the subtle shifts in the characters' feelings.

Within a world where fantasy and reality overlap, a child's gaze gently illuminates the story.

Set in a small Castilian village after the Spanish Civil War, the novel follows the uneasy hours in which the five wives of civil guards wait for the killer to be identified. It is an early novel that layers together the atmosphere of a repressed community and the violence surrounding ordinary life.

The tensions of a sealed-off village slowly rise around a single murder.