This passionate and moving story of social injustice, violence and revenge, set in the Valencian huerta, has become the classic text of Spanish regional realism. Blasco Ibaoez, the ‘Spanish Zola’, dramatically confronts one of the great social issues of the late nineteenth century, the possession of land, in a vivid recreation of the local types and traditional customs of a closed rural community which jealousy guards its rights and administers its own rough justice against the outsider. The novel is both a lyrical hymn to nature and an expose of man’s inhumanity to man, narrated with a human compassion worthy of his master, Galdos.