Institut Ramon LLull

Paula Cid is a reserved, hard-nosed NICU doctor in her early forties, who’s been engaged to Mauro for so long she doesn’t even wear the ring anymore. Their staid relationship ends abruptly when he announces that he is leaving her for another woman. A few hours later, he’s killed when his bicycle is slammed by a car. The shock of her not-exactly widowhood is refracted through the latent grief over her mother’s death decades earlier.

Orriols’ finely hewn prose is infused with frank emotion and at times staggering bluntness, acknowledging the coexistence of true grief with true life: true anger, true desire and true relief. Paula's life is cleaved in two; her self-image and way of being in the world are irrevocably changed by Mauro's death, forcing her to grapple with numbness, longing, passion, solitude, her evolving relationship with her aging widower father, other people’s expectations and —most importantly— her own.