Loosely based on the author's own life, Nada is the story of an orphaned young woman who leaves her small town to attend university in war-ravaged Barcelona.

Long neglected by European historians, the unspeakable atrocities of Franco's Spain are finally brought to tragic light in this definitive work by Paul Preston, the world's foremost historian of 20th-century Spain.

On the Eve of Hitler's Olympics, Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner is forced out of the Kriminalpolizei because he is a half Jew. Hoffner is not surprised given the rise of Nazism, and anyway his focus is elsewhere. His son Georg is missing in Spain, swept up in the sudden outbreak of the civil war. He has already lost Sascha, his elder son, to the Nazi regime. But Georg is not what he appears to be, and when Hoffner discovers this, he is determined...

Set in post-Civil War Spain, a Spanish guerrilla who fought against Franco goes into hiding in France and then returns to visit his dying mother. He is adviced by a kindly priest not to come as a sadistic police chief is waiting for him.