Hive. The Paskual Duarte family. Selo Camilo Kh.

Kamilo Jose of the village (1916–2002) - an outstanding Spanish writer and publicist, Nobel laureate in literature and the main national literary award of Spain - Cervantes Prize.

In a small cafe of a fat, invariably dressed in mourning and hung with jewelry, the Donya Rosa, Donya, is in full swing. Someone looks and soon disappears, picked up by the cycle of a large and noisy city, and someone remains to enter the peculiar family of the regulars of the cafe-an amazing brotherhood of adventurers and simple-filled, noble widows and old virgins, noisy gossips, rich bourgeois and poor poets, Bogecheev and fools, modesters and defectors, Svyatos and harlots...

In the prison, the poor peasant Paskual Duarte, sentenced to the death penalty for a long row of murders, awaits the verdict. What made the usual “little man”, not a psychopath and not a sadist, again and again commit the atrocities that common sense refuse to accept?..