Anne Applebaum

So I have picked a novel for you.

I love novels.

It's not even a long novel.

It's a short novel.

It's called The Time of Cherries.

And it's a novel that's set at the very end of Franco's Spain.

And so it's about the end of a dictatorship, not the beginning of one.

And the author is called Montserrat Roig.

She was a Spanish, kind of part of the Spanish opposition to Franco family.

And the book has a really great description of what it's like to be in a demonstration and then what it's like to be arrested and go to jail.

But it's also other things.

It's how people...

adjusted their lives to the system.

I think it was published a year or two after he died.

And so when people were reading it, it was already history.

But you can see how people's lives have been shaped by politics, just ordinary people, average people.

That's one of the themes that I always find really interesting.

You know, these big things happen in the world.

And how do those relate to ordinary people?

And how do they adjust?