In 1937 a girl stood on a hill, watching a city vanish in smoke as German squadrons skimmed the sky below. The smoke carried the distant echo of Guernica, a town crushed by war. Months later, she boarded two ships with hundreds of companions, escaping toward France aboard the Havana and then heading to the Soviet Union on the coal cargo ship Sontay. She fled Francoist forces, and in the eyes of a nation that had once promised paradise, she found her footing as a survivor, a woman who would know love and loss in equal measure.
The same conflict that scattered her homeland drove her again, this time not from a harbor between Mount Archanda and the Cantabrian Sea, but across the vast reaches of Leningrad. She faced the dark, choking waters of the Gulf of Finland and the icebound surface of Lake Ladoga. Who is this girl who endured those horrors and survived the Nazi siege that targeted the Soviet Union’s second city? It is a life forced to slip away from the Iron Curtain’s pressure in southern Russia the following year. The story follows Teresa Alonso, a woman who lives on the edge of Barcelona, near the Clot and Guinardó neighborhoods, facing health struggles as she approaches a century of life. The narrative presents her as a figure who embodies a century’s worth of emotion and memory, a person whose personality seems to hold the weight of history itself. This is the premise of a novel set in the years surrounding the Basque conflict, the Stalinist era, and the long road back to Spain via Castellón’s port in the late 1950s.
The book weaves a dazzling, agile tale that grips from the opening lines. Teresa’s life becomes a tapestry of adventures, each episode capable of spawning its own spin-off from the central plot. The reader experiences tenderness when recalling the moments Teresa spent in Soviet reception institutions in Kiev and the Crimea, where Spanish children found a peculiar kind of privilege for the era. The romance with a pilot—an enduring love story—adds a pulse that makes the journey feel almost cinematic. The gripping centerpiece is the night convoy that ferried the besieged city across the frozen water to Soviet-held territory, a passage that marks the turning point of her voyage. The moment Teresa’s story returns to its Spanish homeland leaves the reader longing for more of the journey.
Beyond its brisk narration and vivid scenes, the book offers a rare honesty. For readers with long acquaintance of Russia, stories set in the old empire can feel stagy or inaccurate, and it is common to encounter missteps that jar the mood. Rather than rely on broad, generic depictions, this work threads precise descriptions and carefully chosen settings to recreate landscapes and atmospheres that are rarely accessible in person. The text does not pretend to paint every detail perfectly, but it achieves a sense of authenticity that helps readers suspend disbelief. The author’s approach—observant and nuanced—avoids the typical traps of melodrama and instead presents a climate of lived experience. In the era of pandemic creativity, a portion of the novel was crafted during the height of social restrictions, and the result is a readable, reflective piece that resonates as the world again examines Russia and its history. In short, the work earns strong recommendation for readers seeking a vivid portrait of a turbulent century and a story that remains relevant in current global discourse about Russia and Stalinism.