A novel by Almudena Grandes which focuses on the historical period after the end of the Spanish Civil War. With the Franco dictatorship already established and consolidated in the XNUMXs, many dissident Spaniards continue with their lives, escaping as best they can from the tight control of the Regime.
Guillermo Garcia Medina he is a doctor who maintains a false identity in order to survive the dictatorship and its summary justice. However, when the former Republican diplomat Manuel Arroyo returns in 1946 (it being this who provided him with that false identity), Guillermo becomes involved in the mission that Manuel has entrusted to him.
It must be remembered that in 1946 the Second World War has already ended, and Spain lives that double postwar that stretches like a shadow of decades of hardship, famine, and disenfranchisement. The defeated Third Reich, finds in Spain a perfect platform from which to give way to its war criminals of all military scale, trying to avoid the Nuremberg trials that have still been played out since 1945.
Manuel must interfere in the organization that enables this escape route from Germany to Spain and from there to Argentina, towards freedom and anonymity for a multitude of Nazi criminals. A dangerous task in a country surreptitiously compliant with that flight of those who were unofficial Nazi allies.
An interesting action for a different novel of this great writer, but that at no time does it become an absolutely spy novel, since the personal, the intimate continues to weigh as a primary foundation in the definition of characters and setting (I suppose it is not so easy to abandon writing habits and tendencies). But it is true that this point of action, thriller, mystery accompanies the narration in a new way. Definitely Almudena Grandes it has been launched into new literary registers with an interesting and suggestive miscegenation.
You can now reserve the book Dr. García's patients, the new novel by Almudena Grandes, here: