First published 2013
She sits in her Mexico City home, trapped by motherhood and marriage, remembering when she was a young editor in New York who barely came home to sleep. Her current life crumbles while she thinks about her time on the edges of the literary world, where strangers became lovers and poets turned into memories. One figure dominates her thoughts: Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived on the margins of the Harlem Renaissance. Owen knew Federico Garcia Lorca as both friend and rival, played music in Manhattan subway stations, and fixated on a mysterious woman he glimpsed on a train. As the protagonist's two lives blur together, the boundaries between then and now, real and imagined, here and there begin to dissolve. The novel moves between her constrained present and her chaotic past, revealing how obsession shapes both memory and identity.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: dual-timeline, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Mexico City, New York, Harlem
Period: 20th-century
160 pages · Paperback · Granta Books