This book pays homage to an entire generation who lived through a time of upheaval and suffering, not just in Spain but across the planet. It tells stories of simple people who longed, like all of us, for a better world, all with very different solutions seen through different perspectives that ended up as a collective disaster from which the generations to come have had to learn. The characters of this novel are only secondary – they could have been anybody, picked from hundreds or thousands of familiar accounts that survive shut away in the secret memory of our oldest relatives. The true protagonist is History, who must help us to be better.