This is the story of a generation. The complex fabric of many lives and hopes. With his often dazzling prose the author tells us how utopias emerge again from the ashes of defeat. A choral novel that recuperates thirty years of the memory of Spain. La larga marcha speaks about Franco's Spain; speaks about the lives of two generations under an extremely long dictatorship, the life of the post-war generation and the lives of the university students in the 1960s around the socialist circle. Defeat and vanguard. Survival and action. A novel of stimulating characters and precise generations. Rafael Chirbes manages to describe this agitated period with the sympathetic eye of someone who has been there. Nevertheless, the novel has an abrupt ending, Spain's return to democracy is absent from the novel which finishes in 1970 and that is why some critics point out Chirbes' impressive realism.