Dion Ugalde, village doctor, husband, and father, has come to believe that his son Mauro has joined the Fifth Assembly—a Spanish terrorist organization dedicated to bringing down the government by force. In anguish and desperation he reveals to his son a secret he ahs kept for twenty-five years—a secret of his own bloody youth and of blood crimes committed in the name of truth and liberty.
The Bird in Last Year's Nest is a tense involving novel of Spain in the Seventies. It is the story of Dion Ugalde, his wife Maria, and his son Mauro—of Colonel Basa the Chief of the Civil Guard who is at once Ugalde's friend and the man he fears most in the world. It is a story of driving pace and tension whose characters will linger in the reader's mind. And on another level it is a novel of the long-term effects of all attempts to change society by violent means.