A shattering tale of oppression and resistance during Franco's dictatorship, by a beloved Spanish novelist

"Passion in ordinary lives, sobriety and melancholy are the flavors of Delibes's writing . . . with a profound empathy for nature and the poor. . . . The Holy Innocents [is] a ferocious story."-The Guardian

Named One of the Best 100 Spanish-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century (El Mundo) * Adapted into an Award-Winning Film by Mario Camus

In the arid province of Extremadura in 1960s Spain, life on a country estate carries on as it has for centuries: wealthy landowners live in luxury while workers are forced to endure lives of poverty and humiliation. Amid this exploitation and injustice live Regula, the estate's gatekeeper, and her husband, Paco, hunting attendant to the contemptuous Senorito Ivan. Regula's brother Azarias toils as a farmhand, but he prefers chasing tawny owls at night, training his pet jackdaw, and caring for his young niece, who is bedridden. When Paco is injured, the nature-loving Azarias is forced to take over as hunting attendant. But after Senorito Ivan commits an act of enormous cruelty following an unsuccessful hunt, it is only a matter of time before the simmering tensions between the aristocracy and the workers explode.

A perennial Spanish classic, translated into twelve languages but never before into English, The Holy Innocents invites readers into the heart of rural life under Franco's dictatorship. In spare and breathless prose, Miguel Delibes offers up a morally urgent tale of human cruelty and alienation, in which liberation is not only necessary but possible.