Separately, Victor, too, is imprisoned there, before escaping to track her down in Perpignan, where she and her baby son are sheltering with a Quaker family. Yet by the time the war is over, Roser is heavily pregnant and alone, and it will be a slower, infinitely more pragmatic – and more interesting – love that the novel ultimately celebrates.Īlong with some half a million other Spaniards fleeing Franco, Roser makes it to France, where she’s interned in the Argelès-sur-Mer concentration camp. When his parents take in one of his father’s best piano students, Roser Bruguera, it’s Guillem that she falls in love with. Destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world, Roser and Victor will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along.Lanky Victor is in many ways the opposite of his brother, Guillem, a handsome militiaman. Through it all, their hope of returning to Spain keeps them going. But they will also find joy as they patiently await the day when they will be exiles no more. Starting over on a new continent, their trials are just beginning, and over the course of their lives, they will face trial after trial. Together with two thousand other refugees, they embark on the SS Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, to Chile: “the long petal of sea and wine and snow.” As unlikely partners, they embrace exile as the rest of Europe erupts in world war. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires.
Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love.
When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. In the late 1930s, civil war grips Spain.
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