One of the most repeated anecdotes is that of the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín who left scared after a passionate encounter with Ava Gadner. She, the great actress, was surprised to see him rush out of the hotel room and asked him where he was going. He turned and elatedly explained that where he was going to go, tell him!
Well know Manuel Vincent that Ava Gardner's arrival in Spain in the sixties was an earthquake for the cultural and political world of those days. Because the actress breathed fresh air into society, longings for freedom confessed in petit committee by almost everyone.
David, a young man who has spent the first years of his life breathing the Mediterranean air, leaves his city to settle in Madrid and fulfill a dream: meet Ava Gardner and become a film director. Upon his arrival, he presented himself at the Cinematography School determined to pass the entrance exams.
It is the early sixties and in Spain a whole world related to art, cinema and literature enjoys nights full of glamor, fun and extraordinarily free. Movie nights that are followed by days in which the reality of the country is drowned covered by the dark and repressive patina of the Franco dictatorship.
Fiction and reality intersect in this novel set in the recent history of Spain. With his usual mastery, Manuel Vicent portrays in Ava at night the unstable border between a dark and declining time and another that, with the first winds of change, is already beginning to appear on the horizon.
You can now buy the novel "Ava at night", by Manuel Vicent, here: