La caja azul

I don't know how to begin to tell you this story, the one about the blue box. My mother had a secret life that only my grandmother and Aunt Teresa knew about, no one else in the family. For years they searched for my grandfather Antonio, father, husband and brother, a soldier of the Republican army who disappeared in combat in the Battle of the Ebro. This search was so secret that only a couple of days before she died my mother dared to share it with me, to talk about my grandfather and the blue box. There I was, at the foot of her bed, receiving a blue cardboard box. I promised him he wouldn't open it for a few weeks, after he died. Two days later he left me an orphan. It was a long time before he plucked up the courage to remove the lid. Inside, letters, newspaper clippings, documents from prisoner camps, photographs, notes from the Red Cross... The work of three single women during the postwar period looking for the man they wanted... That's where this novel was born.