«[Rafael Azcona] X-rayed his country. He dissected the human being and took sides with the weak and the loser. Author of universal works, he was not only an excellent screenwriter. He was also a fundamental writer ».— The Newspaper.

«Salvation to that terrifying and miserable landscape [which was everyday life in post-war Madrid] is found by the leading couple of The Europeans in pre-hippie Ibiza and in their seedy and pseudo-liberal bubble of happiness».—El Cultural.

«The story of an aspiration never fully resolved: the European longing of the Spaniard who, deep down in his heart, is incapable of being so» .— El Mundo.

«It is no longer possible to classify Azcona alone as a humorist, although, naturally, humor is a legitimate resource for criticizing a given society and environment. The Europeans intends, in an unequivocal way, to carry out a social and, therefore, moral criticism».—Text extracted from the flap of the first edition.

Madrid, 1958. Miguel Alonso, a young Aragonese who works as a draftsman in the office of a renowned architect, receives a phone call one night. On the phone is his friend Antonio, the crazy son of his boss, who wants to propose that he spend two months on vacation in Ibiza paid for, needless to say, by his father. With the excuse of practicing languages and studying the popular architecture of the island, the young men leave the embarrassment of Madrid behind: Antonio, eager to have a good party and hook up with as many "liberated" Europeans as possible; Miguel, who considers himself morally superior to Antonio and refuses to participate in his little games, willing to rest and enjoy the pleasures of the island. Until Odette appears, a discreet and cultured French girl who will shake Miguel's convictions, turning her world upside down and revealing to him an uncomfortable truth: that she is not the man she thought she was.

This is the starting point of The Europeans, one of the so-called "major novels" by Azcona, who makes in these pages an accurate portrait of Spain at the end of the fifties marked by misogyny, narrow-mindedness and the European longing . A moving and deeply human text, not exempt from that biting humor so characteristic of the Logroño, and that he always used with such skill to dissect the miseries of our society.