A Dickensian tale of ambition, family, and financial ruin by the most important Spanish novelist after Cervantes, this tragicomic novel about a patriarch struggling to keep his ungrateful family from ruin is at turns scathing and hilarious.

Ramón Villaamil has been a loyal civil servant his whole life, but a change in government leaves him out of a job and still two months short of qualifying for his pension. Initially optimistic that he’ll be able to find work and pull his family out of their financial straits, he spends his days visiting the Administration, pestering his ex-colleagues to put in a good word for him, and begging his friends in high places for money. At home, Villaamil’s wife, daughter, and sister-in-law—whose feline appearances earn them the nickname “the Miaows”—are unimpressed by Villaamil’s failures, and the only joy left in Villaamil’s life is his young grandson Luis. When Luis’s disgraced father, the handsome and dastardly Víctor Cadalso reappears in their lives with promises of easing their financial burdens, Villaamil has no choice but to allow him back into their midst, even as he knows there is nothing pure about Víctor’s intentions, and that his return could bring them all to ruin.

Comparable to the best of Balzac and Dickens, Benito Pérez Galdós’s satire of lower middle-class life offers a scathing critique of the hypocrisy and corruption within nineteenth-century Spanish society as well as a potent exploration of the value of human life outside of work. Margaret Jull Costa’s inimitable translation captures all the tragicomic vitality of Pérez Galdós’s prose, and proves that he is indeed “the best Spanish writer of the nineteenth century” (Mario Vargas Llosa).