The Confessions of Senora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories

Petesch immerses readers in the lives of people caught up in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, which left 500,000 dead. In the title novella, Petesch conveys the humiliating details of war through the sensibility of a cultured woman as families endure hunger, filth, darkness, and danger in an underground fortress. Brilliant in its imaginative power, and heartbreaking in its access to the bottomless well of human tears, this is a deeply moving work by a mature artist able to convey a particular world so vividly that we can know these people as our own.