2023 NMPW honorable mention

2024 NMPW Zia Award second place

Set in in a mountain village of the Picos de Europa, Northern Spain, during the last years of Franco’s reign, when cows really did wear shoes and people threshed grain riding wooden sledges, a method first mentioned two thou­sand years ago, the book records way of life we can only dream of today. Romanticized maybe, harshly honest, eleven summers through the eyes of an English family describes a time when people had no use for machines or money until its bumpy transition into the twentieth century, when porn, potatoes, plumbing changed everything. Fiestas, Harvest, Threshing, stories of camp life and buried wine, lie hidden within these pages.