Growing up, Javier Cercas was fascinated with the legend of his beloved great-uncle, Manuel Mena, who died at 19 in the bloodiest battle of the Spanish Civil War—while fighting for Franco. Who was this young man? A fascist hero whose memory is now an embarrassment, or a committed idealist who happened to fall on the wrong side of history? In this memoir, Cercas combines family history, investigative scholarship, personal confession, and a novelist's imagination, to piece together the life of his enigmatic relative, and tell the story of an entire generation.