Fernando Reyes is the finest matador of his generation. He has two women who love him, a wife he cannot leave and a mistress he cannot choose, and he has decided, quietly, to do nothing about either of them.
When the bull finds him in the ring, it is not an accident.
What he leaves behind is a frozen vial at a clinic in town, an insurance policy in his wife Isabel’s name, and a secret so improbable that when she finally uncovers it — months later, in a cold laboratory at a breeding station outside the city — she does not know whether to be furious or to laugh.
Isabel is not the kind of woman who laughs.
The Great Fernando is a novel about what women do with what men leave them: the debts, the children, the impossible questions. It is set in 1950s Andalusia and moves with the pace of a thriller and the precision of a scalpel.
