The letter opener begins with the letters that a childhood friend wrote in the 1920s to García Lorca, the distant inspiration of his hopes and dreams. From that first moment of what was perhaps a one-way correspondence, the reader discovers this “novel in letters”. This is also a splendid underground river-novel that reflects the last hundred years of Spanish life and interweaves the public History (the Republic, the civil war, Franco's repression, the “liberated” 1960s, life under democracy) with the private histories of a group of victims, survivors, hustlers, “modern” girls and “the damned.” We get a glimpse of some of the major characters of this time: Lorca, Aleixandre, María Teresa León, Alberti, Eugenio D'Ors, among others. With this novel Vicente Molina Foix won the National Fiction Prize.