Exploring a boy's childhood in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship, this novel, based on the author's own experiences, takes place during the oppressive late 1940s and early 1950s when the dictatorship's repression was strongly felt at all levels of people's everyday lives. Through an affecting first-person narrative and pitiless realism, the boy's bewildered responses to his father's violence and authoritarianism are played out at home and in a neighborhood dominated by street gangs, where politics is never more than a block away.