A Manuscript of Ashes

Its the late sixties, the last dark years of Francos dictatorship: Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuels country estate in the small town of Mgina to write his thesis on an old friend of Manuels, an obscure republican poet named Jacinto Solana.

The country house is full of traces of the poetnotes, photographs, journalsand Minaya soon discovers that, thirty years earlier, during the Spanish Civil War, both his uncle and Solana were in love with the same woman, the beautiful, unsettling Mariana. Engaged to Manuel, she was shot in the attic of the house on her wedding night. With the aid of Ins, a maid, Minaya begins to search for Solanas lost masterpiece, a novel called Beatus Ille. Looking for a book, he unravels a crime.