Winter 1936: the rebel troops that have risen up against the Second Spanish Republic bomb Madrid. The republican government decides to start evacuating the most valuable paintings in the Prado.

A moving ensemble novel that follows a year in the lives of families, neighbours, parents, children, the young and the elderly, ordinary people who have the courage to keep going.

A brilliant satire about a writer who changes languages. An immigrant from eastern Europe is admitted to a Belgian psychiatric hospital and submitted to a linguistic reinsertion therapy to cure his ailment: not writing in his mother-tongue.

The chance discovery of an unusual, apparently worthless painting in the rubble is, in fact, the tip of the iceberg of a collection of extremely valuable, eccentric, irreverent works of art that a group of enlightened people hid during the War of

London, 1871. Young Aurelius feels as though he is languishing away at the family's tavern, living a life as grey as his father's.