A lo largo de sus vidas, Lena y Guillén, Guillén y Lena, cruzarán sus caminos: en la guerra civil española, en la Europa de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, en el inhóspito Frente ruso, en la Varsovia asolada por los nazis, en el cálido y exuberante Tánger de los años cuarenta.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Adventure, love, and war in the chess board of the bloody 20th century: the most personal novel by the author of La Tabla Esmeralda.
In a mountain village, where each day is the same as the last, step-siblings Lena and Guillén, live a poor but tranquil life. Guillén's destiny is to be a shepherd, and Lena's, like all women of her time, is to form a family. But something unexpected happens: a plane accident in the mountain alters their lives forever. Two French aviators have lost their lives, and Guillén is the only one who manages to find where their remains have come to rest. The pilot's widow, Countess Úrsula Zalesca, appears just a few weeks later with an unheard-of proposal: take Guillén to France and bring him up as a son. Someone must keep up with her deceased husband's plane factory, and she believes that the young shepherd is just the person. So Guillén travels to Lyon, where he studies, learns, soaks up more riches than he could ever have dreamed about, and becomes an engineer. But he doesn't forget about Lena, and they continue an epistolary relationship throughout all those years.

Throughout their lives, Lena and Guillén, Guillén and Lena, continue to cross paths: in the Spanish civil war, in the Europe of the Second World War, in the inhospitable Eastern Front, in the Warsaw devastated by the Nazis, in the lush Tangier of the 1940s.