In ‘Death in the Chest’, Román accompanies his young uncle Marcos into the mountains of Lugo province. They are hunting for a wild boar that has caused some damage locally, but Román also knows that this is where Marcos goes to help the resistance fighters under Franco’s regime. They follow the scent of the boar but, once they’re deep inside its territory, the wind changes direction and they are lost. They wander for hours and end up at the house of a young woman called Dora, whom Román understands to be Marcos’ sweetheart. Marcos has obviously been there before. Dora has two brothers, one of whom, Ramiro, has a large knife and rude features. They sleep in a room with a large chest at the foot of the bed. One night, they open the chest, only to discover the corpse of an old woman dressed in black, with one eye open, staring at them. It turns out to be the corpse of Dora’s grandmother, who died recently and they are waiting to bury. Román regrets he does not have the same effect on Dora as Marcos does. After the snow storm, they leave. Several months later, Marcos is found dead in the mountains, either from the tusks of a boar or the bayonets of the Civil Guard. Román begins to take food to the resistance fighters in Marcos’ place and discovers that Dora’s brother Ramiro is one of them. He then receives a message from Dora, who hands him Marcos’ old shotgun, but is unable to commit to a relationship.

In ‘Alf Layla wa-Layla: 1 Resol’, a doctoral student called Mila, who has previously studied the relation between the narrative techniques of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the One Thousand and One Nights, is in a second-hand bookshop when she discovers old copies of a Galician literary magazine, Resol, and among them fragments of the stories that make up The Knife in November. She buys the copies and takes them home. In one of these stories, ‘Lawless Mills’, a medical student in Santiago recalls the time he was invited to witness the dissection of a young woman’s body and later tells the story to a group of people around a fire. Two lovers planned to kill the young woman, who was a rich widow. The man pretended he was in love with her and eventually persuaded her to marry him, despite her family’s concerns. For a time, everything went well, he worked in the mill, grinding flour, but one day the wife turned up dead at home, having been stabbed in the heart. The miller was arrested and charged with her murder, but the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment. It turns out that one of those listening to the story is the man’s mother. She asks the medical student to help her write to him in prison and corrects him on the colour of his eyes, which were not green, as he said, but black.

In ‘Alf Layla wa-Layla: 2 Three Leaves of Rue and One Green Garlic’, the doctoral student Mila looks at whether a book by Luís Seoane translated into Spanish, Three Leaves of Rue and One Green Garlic, ever had a Galician original, or whether the stories were first written in Spanish. This is connected to the identity of narrators and whether it matters that the originals of some stories are never found. In ‘Early Morning Impostures’, a young woman loses her virginity on the same night that her brother is arrested for distributing Communist pamphlets. In ‘Under the Trout’s Skin’, a grandfather explains to his granddaughter how to catch trout, how you have to get under the trout’s skin, understand the way it thinks. They are fishing one day when there is a loud bang. A poacher has used carbide to cause an explosion and kill several trout in one go, but they are not to sell, rather to feed his family. The grandfather, having punched him on the nose, lends him his handkerchief and gives him a wad of notes to help him out. In ‘Karl and Charles in The Red Lion’, Charles Darwin goes to visit Karl Marx in The Red Lion pub in London, where he is staying. They both lament the premature deaths of their children, Annie and Edgar, and ask what there is to live for if not to develop their own ideas and publish books that are later banned. In ‘Alf Layla wa-Layla: 3 Tell in Order to Live’, Mila wonders whether the gender of the narrative voice reflects that of the narrator and examines the experiences of Galician editors in Argentina. In ‘The Knife in November’, the death of an old dictator is compared to the death while young of those fighting for freedom. In ‘From Lavacolla’, a prisoner who is forced to help build Lavacolla airport in Santiago de Compostela writes a postcard to his sister, asking for socks, espadrilles, soap, sulphur ointment (for scabies) and a pencil. Not food, since he claims they have enough. In ‘The Names of Those Who Passed the Rio Negro’, the narrator remembers the names of those who died in exile, having passed the Rio Negro. In ‘In Disagreement’, a priest refuses to enter heaven if they don’t let a friend of his, who fought alongside him, enter with him.