Vlast – Aramburu Fernando (2019)

Basque terrorists announced the laying down of arms in 2011 after forty years of activity. However, for Bittori, the widow of one of the victims, the story is far from over. She decides to return to the scene of the events, to the town and the house where she lived before the murder. She wants to find out who fired the shots. Together with her, we embark on a journey into the past, where the town is slowly overtaken by suspicion and hatred, the entire society is disintegrating under patriotic fever, and it seeps into all relationships. Can Bittori live again with those who turned against her before and after the attack? Can she live with those who turned her life upside down? Bittori's return unsettles the entire town, especially her neighbor Miren, a close friend before the attack, whose son is serving a sentence for terrorist attacks. What turned the two women into enemies? What poisoned the lives of their children, husbands, siblings, neighbors, colleagues, and former friends? A gripping novel about guilt and forgiveness, about the attempt to heal wounds in a divided society, takes place in the Basque Country, but it could have happened anywhere else where ideological fanaticism and blindness, fear, and the inability to communicate and move past disagreements inflict evil that marks every corner of the human soul and disrupts ordinary interpersonal relationships.