Elizabeth Duval’s first novel is discursive and devastating, impregnated with the same traits as the era she portrays. It is sad, passionate, and freighted with ominous signs: a portrait of violence, images, words.

«I’d like to enjoy it, but I can’t, and it hurts not having you by my side to contemplate my great semantic empire: I no longer need to direct all the instruments of a tiny radical group, a cell, because my discourse is everywhere and my voice is in every voice and everyone speaks my language.»

Madrid, 2016. Two squatted buildings, between Goya and Lavapiés, overlook the city in an expansionist mood: the former offices of NO-DO, overtaken by a fascist cell, and the ruins of an abandoned film studio, now turned into the headquarters of a Marxist-Leninist group. Between the two spaces, the Castle and the Commune, appear Santiago and Ramiro, sons of a shattered, misanthropic city. As everyone knows, any Madrid resident worth his salt is always thinking about exterminating the social class he doesn’t belong to.

Fireworks hurled at mosques, protests that turn to fights, internet forums as weapons of mass destruction. The future of the capital, where innocence has been eradicated and love has become a privilege, will be linked to the fate of these two organizations on the political fringes.