Juan Marse's intensely moving novel is set in a suburb of Barcelona in the years immediately following World War i, among a family of Republican sympathisers still recovering from defeat in Spain's harrowing Civil War.
David, the protagonist of the story, and his attractive red-haired mother, who is pregnant, have been deserted by David's father, an alcoholic, who is being pursued for political reasons by Inspector Galvan. The fantasy world the boy inhabits is fuelled by the films he sees at his local cinema and by images of war - Spitfires crashing into the sea, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima - and by the image of an RAF pilot, Captain O'Flynn, whose photograph from a magazine cover is pinned on his bedroom wall.
The detachable lizards' tails which David and his friend collect serve as a metaphor for the disconnected, random events that build up into this masterly and unforgettable evocation of childhood and adolescence.
