An old social custom -that of visiting the sick- becomes, in this new novel by Vicente Valero, the unique pretext for the creation of an original and attractive mosaic of stories and portraits. As in The Transitions (Peripheral, 2016), the narrator returns to the childhood years and his native island to inquire into the state of a society that is about to witness the death of Franco and the beginning of the Transition. But Old Patients, in addition to being an implacable portrait of the society of those years, is above all a novel about childhood, with its unusual discoveries and ephemeral certainties, which foster a juicy and fun anecdote. The story, in short, of a convulsive learning in times of profound and decisive changes, in which the reader will be able to find situations and characters as close as they are unforgettable.