Fifteen years after his military coup and his control of power, General Bionche decides to respond to popular and international pressure and hold a presidential referendum that determines his fate. The Minister of the Interior summons advertising expert and former detainee Adrian Bettini. To convince him to lead the campaign to make Pyoncé a success, the leader of the opposition coalition consisting of sixteen discordant parties proposes to Bettini a crazy idea: running the election campaign for the “No” campaign, which is embodied only in a short television advertisement.
Instead of the usual focus on the massacres, detainees, and the horrors of the past period, Bettini suggests that the title of the campaign be: Joy is Coming. Will a fifteen-minute announcement succeed in overthrowing a dictatorial rule that lasted fifteen years?
In an optimistic, poetic style, Scarmetta tells a true struggle story of hope and joy, in the darkest of times, in a country longing for freedom.
Unlike the rest of the men in his village, Mario decides not to spend his life as an ordinary fisherman, so he decides, using his bicycle, to work as a postman in a small village, even though it only has one person who receives and sends letters. Chile's greatest poet, Pablo Neruda.
In his exile there, the poet lives as an observer and participant in the great changes taking place in Chile, and through small meetings and discussions about love, poetry and politics, a special relationship is established between him and the young postman who is immersed in love and enchanted by Neruda’s poetry, which he sees as his right because poetry does not belong to its writer but to those who need it. .
Through charming details of the human relations in a small village between the poet steeped in politics and the postman in love steeped in poetry, Scarmeta recounts the great political changes that took place in Chile and the rise and fall of revolutionary dreams.