Eighteen-year old Andrea moves to Barcelona to stay with relatives she has not seen in years while she pursues her dreams of studying at university. Arriving in the dead of night she discovers not the independence she craves, but a crumbling apartment and an eccentric collection of misfits whose psychological ruin and violent behaviour echoes that of the recent civil war.

As the tension between the family members grows in claustrophobic intensity, Andrea finds comfort in a friendship with Ena, a girl from university whose guilded life only serves to highlight the squalor of Andrea's own experiences. But what is the secret of the relationship between between Ena and Andrea's predatory uncle Roman, and what future can lie ahead for Andrea in such a bizarre and disturbing world?

Translated by Edith Grossman

"One of the great classics of contemporary European literature" (Carlos Ruiz Zafon author of The Shadow of the Wind)"A story that Carmen Laforet narrates in prose both exalted and icy, in which what is unspoken is more important than what is said, keeping the reader of the novel submerged in indescribable anguish from beginning to end" (Mario Vargas Llosa)"Laforet's voice is calm and clear...this remarkably sophisticated novel ...is unlike most Spanish literature of the time and before" (Michael Eaude Independent)"A welcome rediscovery and a fascinating danse macabre" (Daily Mail)"Laforet develops her narrative in a series of cataclysmic, operatic confrontations, in which no holds are barred. The language...is poetic, melodramatic, hyperbolic. Yet it never feels forced or ersatz... Nada is Zola-esque...what particularly impresses is the haunted atmosphere, the intensity of the paranoia and the unpredictability, and the Cinderella-eyed sensibility of it's heroine... A gothic horror story which deserves the widest possible readership" (Alan Taylor Sunday Herald)