A young man listens as his grandmother (Dolores) recounts stories from her life, which he writes down in the hope of making sense of them all. Following a fortune-telling Galician childhood and romantic adventures with a much older lover, Dolores"s story takes her to Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century. Finding work as a maid in the household of a high-ranking Cuban official, she finds herself immersed in a whirlwind of political change. A magical realist account of Ramon Chao"s family saga and the political maelstrom into which he was born, tracing a personal and political line from the Spanish-American War to the Spanish Civil War. "Chao"s work is equal parts historical fiction, family saga, and magical realism, and like all life-spanning chronicles, some stories provide bigger punches than others."--Publishers Weekly Sept. 9, 2013