Letters from the Mountains by Patricia Román 'To the people of Andalucia whose past suffering was the catalyst for creating this story'

Ernesto is somewhat inept, naïve and slow on the uptake, and you are going to love him. A musician in a Cuban nightclub, he flees his homeland and abandons the woman he loves after witnessing a blood drenched murder. He fetches up in a village somewhere in rural southern Spain.

‘Andalucia 1957

Bar receipts, bus tickets, nameless fluff, Ernesto rummaged through his pocket, pulled out the envelope and squinted at the date. Was it ’47 or ’49. Hard to tell. He studied the address, stained with grease from an oil-soaked sardine he’d devoured to stave off his hunger, and marked with drips of tawny rum that looked like blood.’

Personal hygiene is not one of Ernesto’s talents. Nor is being aware of what is going on around him. He’s left Cuba for a land where he speaks the language but has no intuition for the political landscape.

‘Two years of lacklustre conversations. Back home talk was fertile and strident, with simultaneous chatter about everything from the going rate of the dollar to national politics, and, of course, the Mafia. Here though, discussions were dull and subdued as if no-one had a serious opinion about anything.’

Ernesto leaves Cuba a few years before a revolution and lands in a Spain where a different sort of revolution has installed an authoritarian regime that has permeated every level of society down to the cracks between the paving stones of the Andalucian pueblo where he rents a modest room. Ernesto reads newspapers avidly and seems to understand nothing.

Then the owner of the newspaper shop beneath Ernesto’s rented room asks him to look after a packet of letters for him. And, of course, Ernesto can’t help but look at the letters – and carry them around in his pocket, and get them covered in sardine grease.

Patricia Román lets her readers believe they are one step ahead of Ernesto, smarter and more sophisticated and blessed with hindsight, and all the while she pulls in more and more characters to make that smug certainty less and less tenable. As Ernesto gets to know and befriend more people, the reader gets more and more uncertain about what is actually going on.

A provincial revolution, an assassination, an act of resistance, something like that is in the air – something either romantically tragic or comically inept. Whatever it is, Franco is going to live and other, simple people are going to die, we know that. But what about Ernesto? And what about those letters?

‘ “Where did you get them, Juan? At least tell me that.”

“Well Dolores gev me the first un and the rest well it’s too risky to tell.”

“And why bring them to me? And why ask me to read them now?” '

Not that he hasn’t already been reading them, taking them out of his trombone case one at a time and hurriedly stuffing them back in as he uncovers yet one more dangerous local secret.

Of course it all goes horribly, and comically, wrong.

‘Ernesto felt as small as the insects that scuttled across his floor at night. What was he going to say? How could he explain?’

Patricia Román leaves you to ponder which is the greatest tragedy of all – a people

suppressed and divided against themselves, a child betrayed by his friend, a mesh of confused intentions, some good some bad, a father’s love distorted?

But a child is a child, and a child has a future. Life goes on in the pueblo - for most people. And we, the sophisticated readers, know there are decades yet to go of Franco’s hold on Spain.

If you love stories about ordinary people struggling to be whole in difficult times, if you’ve had enough of simplistic heroism and triumphalist history, then Letters from the Mountains is for you.