Imagine a city that smells of flowers and freshly baked pastry, whose ambience is filled with the sound of bells and the raging flow of the nearby river. Imagine it bathed with Spanish sunlight and the warm sea breeze blowing from the Levant. Then imagine its people, their faces sad, their limbs gaunt, their hearts broken, and their lips sealed and rendered incapable of expressing all emotions. Imagine that you are in this city. And its name is Oleza. In this masterpiece of Spanish literature, originally written as two separate novels in the early part of the 20th century, Gabriel Miró (1879-1930) takes us to a fictitious place patterned after Orihuela, the city where he grew up, and masterfully describes the tension between tradition and modernity, and the emptiness that intolerance and absolutism create in a society at the threshold of a new era. A piece of literature so controversial among readers that it even impeded Miró's entry into the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. Our Father San Daniel provides an exquisite glimpse not only into the lives of the characters whose happiness depends on going against the prevailing mores of the time, but also into the richness, exactitude, and eloquence of the prose of Gabriel Miró.