If the Frank & Celestina trilogy had a theme song, it would be Sketches of Spain by Nits.
Not the Miles Davis piece, but the haunting Dutch song from 1983. It is quiet, elegiac, and full of echoes.
It begins with the line:
“The streets of Barcelona are filled with blood and rain.”
That lyric became the seed for the first novel’s title, Blood and Rain. It captured everything I wanted the story to be. A collision of love and violence, beauty and loss.
When I wrote the trilogy, I often returned to that song. It moves like memory – gently, hesitantly – as if afraid of breaking what it remembers. Then the percussion breaks the calm like a machine gun. And the refrain that refuses to fade:
“It never ever, never ever, never stops.”
In the deepest, darkest moments of A Sky Without Stars, as the world relentlessly piles its weight onto Frank and those he loves, he echoes that line in despair: “It never stops.” The same sentiment, the same exhaustion. War is relentless, and all anyone caught in it wants is for it to end.
That line became the emotional spine of the entire saga. It’s history itself speaking. The endless cycle of wars, betrayals, and fragile acts of mercy that never truly end. In A Sky Without Stars, those words close the circle between music and story.
It isn’t coincidence. Sketches of Spain is one of those rare songs that take you to a place and show you what’s happening with the same clarity as a photograph or a piece of film.
For me, that song is the trilogy:
how beauty survives horror,
how memory outlasts time,
and how, even when everything ends,
it never really stops.
No matter when you’re born, there are choices to make, and hard times to endure.
It never stops.
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