Restoration

Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family's house, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she works her way through the rooms, scrubbing, scraping and plastering over cracks, the stories inside them begin to wake, and the lives of the women who lived there before her start to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what is kept in the last locked room?

Ave Barrera's novel is driven by female desire and shaped by the violence of the male gaze. It draws on old stories retold for new readers and engages with Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez and Amparo Dávila. The result is a novel about obsession, reclamation and a romance that goes very wrong.

Restoration is a ghost story whose borders are porous, between Jasmina and the forgotten women, and between the novel and its readers. The questions it raises may point to what lies behind a barred door of our own.