Living's the Strange Thing — Carmen Martin Gaite

Agueda, a 35-year-old woman who has lived and loved hard, has just lost her mother. Finding her precarious equilibrium besieged, she struggles to keep her curiosity about the world intact. In an effort to give her life structure, she returns to her old, unfinished doctoral dissertation: a study of an extravagant and enigmatic 18th-century adventurer. Inexorably, her investigation leads to profound reflections on her own strange childhood, her parents' equally strange marriage, and her own emotional landscape. Introspective, but with the pace and intrigue of a thriller, Living's the Strange Thing will keep the reader engrossed until the end. Carmen Martín Gaite is one of Spain's most distinguished novelists; in 1978, she was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature.