A Basque Remembrance (The Last Gondras)

The multi-award-winning writer of The Gondras (A Basque History, Oberon Books) and The Other Gondras (Another Basque History), completes his acclaimed landmark trilogy spanning centuries and generations.

A Basque town inches towards reconciliation after generations of conflict.  But one family struggles still to piece together the past and make sense of the present. Following the death of one of the town’s most famous sons – a writer whose own work, inspired by his family’s own story, brought up memories that some had thought best forgotten – the remaining members of the Gondra clan are faced once again with how best to handle their family’s history, and the imposing clifftop house that has symbolised it for generations. A widowed husband, an adopted child, and feuding twins from either side of the political divide grapple with resentments and traumas decades in the making, even as a family wedding seeks to bring hope for the future. Meanwhile, the writer’s ghost watches on, forced to witness the untidy fallout from his death. Have his attempts to write about his family and his homeland done nothing to heal the wounds of the past? Have they only made things worse? And what will the effect be of his final legacy? An unpublished manuscript intended to bring the story to an end is not his only unexpected bequest to an unsuspecting bloodline. In life, he sought to tell stories, to account for the effects of history on the people around him. But in death, guided by the ghosts of Gondras past, he sees that he too was just one character, in narrative far bigger than himself.

Let the Gondra house fall down. Please. Or pull it down with your own hands. But don’t carry on the memory of this godforsaken family. I made a mistake. I thought I was healing the wounds by giving a voice to all those old stories, but all I did was rub salt in them… It’s the ones who disappeared in silence who found some kind of peace… Because out there, out at sea, far from this cursed land, something finally stops hurting… While I’m condemned to stay here on this shore, holding up a house of words that the tide knocks down over and over again… This is what your dead father is asking of you, son: if you can’t embrace your old enemy, let the stones finally fall down.

The Last Gondras (A Basque Remembrance) premiered in Spanish at the Centro Dramático Nacional (the national theatre of Spain; teaser trailer below), in October 2021. It was translated into English with support from the Fundación SGAE, the foundation of the Spanish society of authors. This support has allowed for the entire trilogy to be translated in full. Read here about part one and part two.

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