The Yellow Rain

Andrés, the last living inhabitant of Ainielle, a real village high in the Aragonese Pyrenees abandoned by everyone else, keeps a final vigil alone among the ruins with his memories and his dead. Llamazares maps the dying village exactly: Andrés's house, the empty homes of the departed, the silent mill and fields, the cemetery he tends, and the mountain path down to the next village that he can no longer bring himself to take, as the yellow rain of falling poplar leaves buries it all.

Andrés

Ainielle (Andrés's house)

The vigil

Alone in his house in the deserted village, the last man in Ainielle keeps company only with his memories and the ghosts of the dead, waiting for his own end. Llamazares gives the whole novel over to his interior monologue, a meditation on solitude, memory and death as slow and encroaching as the mountain snow.

The vigil

explicit Andrés lives out his last days in his house in Ainielle, a real abandoned village in the Aragonese Pyrenees; his home is the centre of the book's long solitary vigil.

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