In “Aún es de día”, the second novel of Miguel Delibes, Sebastián, who is a mentally distressed and por man, suffers the mocking of his neighbours and he is even tricked by the girl he had fallen in love with and to whom he dreamed to get married one day. He tries to overcome all these issues with a rich interior life but the roughreality breaks through and is stronger than his spirituality.

This novel thoroughly portraits the city life of a province of the last century, during the inmmediate Spanish postwar period.

In “El camino”, the tirht of the novels of Miguel Delibes is where he finds is voice and his personal style, according to his own confession.

Childhood is again the central theme of this novel. The village of Molledo de Portolín in Cantabria, the place where Delibes spent his childhoos and also the origin of his father´s family roots, serves him as inspiration for this novel.

Daniel, el Mochuelo, the eve before he left his hometown to go to the cty to begin with his studies, evokeshis elen years in the village where he spent his childhood together with his close friends, Roque, el Moñigo, and Germán, el Tiñoso. The adventures of these three kids, whose friendship is also truncated by the death of one of them as it also happened in “La sombra del ciprés es alargada”, fill the pages of this wonderful story that shows a mixture of tenderness and a subtle sense of humor combined in perfect harmony with the characters and their environment.

Delibes´ narrative style fresh and direct, take special mastery in this work.

Mi idolatrado hijo Sisí” is one of the most ambitiuos Works of Delibes either in content as well as in its form.

It also presents a narrative novelty the historial contextualization that the novelist makes throughout the news that he takes from the newspapers.

The novel is divides in three books that recreate three different and consecutive periods of theSpanish history of the XIX century-1917-1920; 1925-1929; 1935-1938-. The novel tells the story of Cecilio Rubes, a trader in the capital of a province, he is a catholic only in appearance and with a tipicl upper-middle class mentality, whose selfishness makes him conform with only having one child that he spoils and toletares everything, but he will brutally lose his child to the Spanish Civil War.

The novel is a clear moral satire in which Delibes, with subtle irony snd without any prejudism censors the Malthusianism, creating at the same time one the unforgetteable characters that he he gave life.

Destino, 1955

Miguel Delibes obtains the National Literature Award for the novel “Diario de un czador”, which he started on the 5th of January of 1954- as it recalls his ahndscript- and published on March of 1955.

The protagonist of this novel, Lorenzo, janitor of a High School and a hunter, jots down in his diary with an expressionist language full of nuances and popular expressions, not only his hunting adventures but also all the aspects that involve his modest live with his mother, a widow, and his girlfriend Anita, whom he eventually would get married, but not in this novel.

Miguel Delibes pointed out that Lorenzo, the protagonist of “Diario de un cazador”, “Diario de un emigrante” and “Diario de un jubilado”, had been so far the most optimistic and cheerful character that he had created.

Destino, 1958

Miguel Delibes confessed that he wrote this novel inpired by his visit to Santiago de Chile in 1955, and after Reading during his trip his own novel “Diario de un cazador”, which had just been printed.

Lorenzo, the hunter, this time already married to Anita, emigrates to Chile in the search of a better living, since the poverty and limited opportunities that Castilla offered were a fact.Throughout a scarce year that this adventure lasts, Lorenzo would keep on writing down in his diary all the details about his settlement in that new country and his adaptation to the new customs, his little quarrels with his wife, the surprising new use of the Spanish language, his dreams and expectations but also the uprooting , the strangement of those who are forced to leave their own country and the final deception to the impossibility of achieving a wealthier living.

It is amazing the mastery of the novelist to make his own the way of speaking of the Chilean people, whose funny and diverse vocabulary is step by step incorporated by the character of Lorenzo and to his peculiar way of speaking too.

Destino, 1959

The moving carácter of this novel, Mr.Eloy, repeats over and over again that he got the red page in the “rolling smoking paper package” of life, referring to the page that back then-during the fifties of the XIX century- used to come in the smoking paper packages that smokers used to roll his cigarettes, and that meant that the paper were about to be finished. Either with this expressive metaphor, either with his same old story that “retirement is the preface to death”, Mr. Eloy, retired, old and forgotten by his only child, shares his life with a maid of the village, Desi, who had also lost the only person she had some kind of attachement, so she feels lonely and abandoned as the old man.

Mr Eloy and Desi are the protagonist of a story of despair that spins around the old age, loneliness and despair, although, all this is softened as usual with the tenderness, the restraint lyricism and the balsamic sense of humor that Delibes gives to his most pathetic stories.

Destino, 1962

Since Delibes felt cut off in his expression to condemn the subjugation of the rural life in Castilla, from the newspaper that he runs El Norte de Castilla, he tries to dodge the censorship and he writes this novel. “Las ratas” is a rough and tragic vision of the regions and people of Castilla during the first half of the past century.

The atmosphere, the geographic situation and the unchangeable social structure determine in a decisive way the existence reason of the inhabitants of the village in this novel whose extreme poverty forces them to hunt and eat rats from the river nearby  to survive.

Among all the characters of the story who are rather intellectually simple and rude, arises the character of Nini as if he was a miracle, since he represents diring the whole novel the only hope against the tragedy that sourrounds the village and its inhabitatnts. Nini is no doubt one of the most representative creations of Delibes.

Destino, 1966

Carmen Sotillo, Menchu, has just lost his husband, Mario and she is having a wake on his corpse all night long. Some underlined paragraphs in a Bible that Mario kept on his bedside table unchain in Menchu a wave of memories and a very dense and disorganize monologue in which she revises their life together, including all the details of understanding and misundertandings between them. Menchu´s upper- middle class mentality makes a contrast with the liberal and non-conformist but committed character of Mario, so she critizises those aspects all along the novel.

As a matter of fact, and according to Delibes´own revelation, this formula of the interior monologue adopted by the novelist in this work, responded to the exigencies of the censorship of those times, since if he had presented Mario as a living character, defending the ideas that his widow reproaches, the novel wouldn´t have obtained the approval of the censors.

Destino, 1969

The novel “Parábola del naúfrago” is a literary experiment and it is in fact an athypical and isolated case in Delibes´narrative.

This work apart from being a harsh critique to the totalitarian regimes, independently of what sign they respond to, it also contains a formal satire against the theories of the destruction of the language which were prevailing at the time of the publishing of the novel and that Delibes recreates not only with the indescriptable invented language of the protagonist but also with the signs of punctuations at the start of the novel and here and there all along the novel.

As if it was the literal transcription of a nightmare, Delibes narrates for us the life, the sinking and the final silly transformation into a fool of Jancinto San José.

Secluded in a Recovery Refuge of Don Abdón S.L., symbol of the autocrat and patronising power, Jacinto San José, an admiring calligrapher and expert in calculating figures, has to carry out a strict medical cure, since he starts getting dizzy when he draws the number zero, he also gets mistaken with the Os, he also is obliged to this cure since he invented and promoted the movement for “ going mute for peace” and its correspondant language and to feel sorry for the “Doggy” degrading of his friend Genaro Martín.

Destino, 1973

In 1973 comes out “El príncipe destronado” a novel which Delibes wrote in 1964.

Quinco, a three year old boy, sees how he is suddenly ousted when his little baby sister is born. And all his efforts, as many other children in his circumstances, were call the attention of everyone and stand out, and to continue being the center of attention of the grown ups, especially his mum.

“El príncipe destronado” is just a detailed story- hour bu hour- of a normal day in the routinary life of Quico and his family. But the novel is at the same time a portrait of the family relationships and conflicts in particular those of the father and the mother who live during the postwar period- when the novel is set, and from very different points of view: the side of the winners and on the other hand the side of the defeated. The cinema version of this novel that will be adapted by Antonio Mercero reflects in its title this aspect of the novel “la Guerra de papa” (“Dad´s war”).

Miguel Delibes offers in some of his novels admirable and full portraits of protagonist that are children. In the case of little Quico the writer reaches a peak in his mastery to describe and recreate the children´s soul and spirit.

Destino, 1975

This novels takes form of a dialogue, in which the convict Pacífico Pérez, convicted for homicide, reveals to the doctor of the prison his life and his feelings. All along the interrupted story of this young man from a small village who possess an amazing sincerity and candor and who is extremely sensitive, the reader gets to know and discover the truth about a confronted and violent country and society that is not able to live generation after generation without a war to fight. “Each man has his own war as he has his own woman”, this is the conclusion that naïve Pacífco reaches who at the end, victim of a society to which he didn´t know and he couldn´t adapt to, will die crushed by those who determine the rules in that society.

Destino, 1978

Mr.Cayo lives in a village that is practically in ruins, in the village live only two neighbours that do note ven talk to each other. One day three members of a political party arrive to the village to do electoral propaganda coinciding with the hold of the first democratic elections.

The categories of the old peasant-Mr. Cayo- his shooting way of speaking, his wisdom about the land and life in general have a huge contrast with the rough and rough language of the newcomers, with their temporaryplans and proposals, in this way the y clearly show the contrast between two worlds and two cultures that ignore each other: one is slowly disappearing and the other is noisy, is a cliché and is overcrowded and it is coming to substitute the later. The novel is prove and a satire of the antithesis between the two conceptions of life and even of history, but once again in this story, the tenderness and melancholy of Delibes humanize the loss of the world symbolized by Mr. Cayo.

Planeta, 1981

Destino, 1983

A retired sixty year old man one day found in a magazine, at the waiting room of the doctor´s office, and advertisement of a 56 year old widow who requested to exchange letters with gentlemen of maximum 65 years old and similar situation to hers. Eugenio Sans Vecilla make his own the proposal and starts sending letters to the woman and so a mail correspondence begins between them, although the novel only shows the letters sent by the man (protagonist)

These letters bit by bit reveak the stingy personality of the man and the past and the present of a selfish and pretentious old bachelor who the only idea that he has about love are the unrealistic dreams that  the exchange of letters produce in him.The novel ends with a final malicious surprise perhaps a bit cruel, that can remind us of the adventure and pieces of news related to the gossiping social life and that perhaps leaves the bitter taste of human loneliness and how difficult can sometimes be the relationships for human beings.

Destino, 1985

El tesoro is once again another novel about the clash between the city life and the countryside life: the typical representation of the kindness of the rural life versus the malicious of the court.

In this novel the peasant of an unknown place in Castilla in whose land has been found a prehistoric “treasure”, oppose to the scientific workof a group of acheologists that arrive to the place to study and catalogue the finding. The ignorance and greed of those primary peasants- Delibes keeps on condemning the abandoned situation of the countryside of Castilla- only let them be suspicious and they can only see in the expents sent by the public administration, a group of thieves that arrive to steal what belongs to them.

To write this novel, Delibes was inspired by true events that had as protagonist a group of archaeologist very close to him.

Destino, 1987

Originally the title of this novel was “377A, to have what it takes to be a hero”, but later on Miguel Delibes decided to reduce the title to make it clearer.

This novel contains many autobiographical details-377A, for instance, was the number that Delibes receibed during his enlisting period in the cruise “Canarias” in his military service at the Spanish Navy, and can be considered as one of the most ambitious and prolific of the castillian writer.

Gervasio García de la Lastra- image of the child and teenager that Miguel Delibes was and his group of friends at the time when the Spanish Civil War was declared- experiences a strange phenomenon every time he listens to military music: he gets goosebumps on his neck. This strange oddity is interpreted by great part of his family as a kind of genetic tendency to become a hero, nevertheless later on it will be proven that this singularity was a sign of quite the opposite.

With this expressive anecdote, Miguel Delibes narrates with great mastery the adventures of several characters that see themselves involved in a war that was unannounced but will leave a mark on them forever, exactly what happened to the novelist and all the people around him.

Destino, 1991

A prestigious painter who was inmerse in a deep creational crisis starts evoking for his daughter who recently had come out of prision, several memories that spinned around two main events which were decisive in his life: the detention of his daughter and her husband due to political issues and above all, the illness and sudden death of his wife.

Again with a strong autobiographical load-Delibes pays a tribute to his wife who passed away in similar circumstances in 1974-, the novel is about an intense and unstoppable love story toward death but also a portrait of a woman transformed into a character, with an extraordinary human personality.

Destino, 1995

Lorenzo was first the hunter in “Diario de un cazador” (“Diary of a hunter”), 1955, then he was an emigrant in Chile in “Diario de un emigrante” (“Diary of an Emigrant”), 1958, and now, fourty years after his firsts adventures, with his shotgun on his shoulder around the wastelands of Castilla, he comes back to become the protagonist of this third novel at the age of seventy and already retired from a automovile factory.

Miguel Delibes had always wanted to transform Lorenzo into his literary alter ego and make him practice the sports that he practiced and growing older with him. Nevertheless, due to his dutty to pay attention to other characters and circmstances, four decades had passed by without going back to this dynamic and foul-spoken hunter who, according to the writer, was his most optimistic character. Lorenzo, that primitive human but warm hearted and simple ambitions, apart from getting retired, during all these years has seen himself dragged by the consuming society, this fcat gives Delibes the opportunity to harshly critizise the fake and materialistic world of out time.

AÑO: 1998

Heretic is the last novel published by the author. This novel is dedicated to “Valladolid, my city”and it represents, according to the words of Miguel Delibes, his most complex and ambitious novel.

In the same year that Luther provokes the schism in the Roman Church, 1517, was born in Valladolid Cipriano Salcedo, son of a wool tradesman and who would become a tradesman too and manufacturer of clothes, that due to some sentimental reasons, more that moral ones, joins the protestant cult which was founded and lead in Valladolid by Doctor Cazalla. The Spanish Inquisition cuts off completely this religious schism and condems to burn alive all the followers, Cipriano Salcedo amongst them.

The human and spiritual adventures of this honest man, another looser in the gallery of characters of Delibes, serves the writer to make a mastery recreation of the city of Valladolid at the time of Charles the first, of its people and costums and of the political and religious agitations of that time, but avobe all, it represents the fight of the human beigns to reach the truth and defend his freedom of mind.