Ismael, a successful novelist, has been suffering from writer’s block for two years, trying to get inside his female narrator’s head and failing. However, he tells no one about this problem and continues to spend each day in his study, supposedly writing. When his mother is taken into hospital, he is forced to spend time with his father who has the beginnings of dementia. This experience carries him back to a moment in his childhood that has remained hidden away in his memory until then.
Jasone, Ismael’s wife, has always been his first reader and editor. As a student, she used to write, but has devoted the last decade of her life to her daughters and to her husband’s career. Now that the girls have left home, Jasone finds herself drawn to ideas and causes she believed were the domain of her best friend Libe, as well as to an old flame, who is also her husband’s publisher. The rape of a young woman in a nearby town triggers something in Jasone, and she begins spending her nights at her computer writing a novel she never expected to write. When the couple’s respective secrets are revealed, everything will change.
With intelligence and wisdom, Karmele Jaio brilliantly dissects the complexities of relationships of all kinds, never coming down on one side, but allowing her characters space to evolve and take up roles of their own making.
About the author
Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers. She won the Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa in 1992 and for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão in 2012, and was shortlisted for the following books: The Relic (1996) by Eça de Queiroz, The Migrant Painter of Birds (2002) by Lídia Jorge, The City and the Mountains (2009) by Eça de Queiroz, and The Land at the End of the World (2012) by António Lobo Antunes. With Javier Marías, she won the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White, and, in 2000 and 2011, she won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize for, respectively, All the Names and The Elephant’s Journey, both by José Saramago.In 2008, she won the Pen Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz. In 2015, she won the Marsh Children’s Fiction in Translation Award for The Adventures of Shola by Bernardo Atxaga, and in 2017, with her co-translator Robin Patterson, she won the Best Translated Book Award for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso. In 2018 she won the Premio Vall-Inclan for On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes.
In 2013, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in 2014, was awarded an OBE for services to literature. In 2018, she was awarded the Ordem Infante D. Henrique by the Portuguese government and a Lifetime Award for Excellence in Translation by the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in New York.
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