Institut Ramon LLull

A complex portrait of a Protestant family in 20th century Barcelona, and the dramatic, explosive, difficult mother at its centre: Raquel—her father’s favourite triplet—lives through the war, even being sent to southern France to escape the bombing and the long dictatorship, marries a doctor and plays out a role of thwarted creativity and conflicted motherhood for her own three daughters. The narrator, Sara, now a mother herself, looks back on their relationship through the lens of Raquel’s aging and death in this one-sided conversation. Raquel’s true voice melds with the words in her autobiography, a small golden notebook Sara only reads after she’s gone. It stands as testament to the love she was unable to express when she was alive, leaving her daughters to often question whether her actions were the result of stupidity or of outright cruelty. As Raquel succumbs to frailty, Sara is freed to feel compassion for her, to find her own maternal reflection in her and, ultimately, to see her mother for who she was.