Quick take
A contemporary fairy tale about photography, feminism, bad men, and old houses.
Synopsis
Propelled by female desire, shaped by the violence of the male gaze, and inspired by the endless vitality of old stories remade anew, Restoration takes on Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez, and Amparo Dávila to produce a novel of obsession, reclamation, and romance gone very, very wrong.Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room--scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks--the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked room?Restoration is a ghost story with porous borders, between Jasmina and these forgotten women, between the novel and us. And the questions Barrera asks may be about what's behind our own barred door.
About the author
Ave Barrera (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1980) is a writer and editor. Her first novel, Puertas demasiado pequeñas (2016) won the Sergio Galindo Award and was published by Charco Press in its English translation under the title The Forgery (2022). Restoration is her second novel to appear in English. It first appeared in 2018 in Mexico and Spain and won the Lipp Prize. Ave has also published short stories and essays in several anthologies and electronic media. Since 2019 she coordinates the Vindictas Collection for the National University of Mexico. In 2023 she received a grant from the Kislak Foundation for a writing residency at the University of Florida, USA.
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More books published by Charco Press
What they do: ‘Charco Press focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world. We aim to act as a cultural and linguistic bridge for you to be able to...
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