Adrian Nathan West

After a car collision ends her career as a ballet soloist with the National Dance Company in Madrid, 22-year-old Maya Rivet finds herself abandoned by her vindictive grandmother to mourn her past life alone. When she discovers some vintage photos in an old music box, Maya musters the courage to travel to Sorrento, Italy, in search of the man she suspects is her birth father. There she meets handsome and fascinating 29-year-old Lucas Velasco, who fled Madrid years ago to escape his toxic family. He arrived in Sorrento a lost and broken young man with no plan, no resources, and no confidence. But he found a community that welcomed him with open arms and created for himself a beautifully carefree life. Seeing the opportunity to share that warmth with Maya, who has nowhere to go, he takes her into his home, and what starts as an uplifting friendship blossoms into love. But when Lucas discovers the secrets that Maya has been keeping from him, their love is tested to the limit, and when both return to Madrid, the turmoil of family ties and conflict tear them apart. Only when they can resolve their family traumas, can they begin to find their way back to each other.

What is our relationship with the dead? How do we remember them? What dark secrets do our images of them hold? How do we emerge from grief to face the time we have left? Ten years after the tragic death of her husband, Dolores Ayala, owner of an old photography studio that has run out of clients, receives the most unusual assignment of her career: to take a portrait of a deceased person on the day of his funeral. Accepting it leads her to meet Clemente Artes, an eccentric old man obsessed with recovering the ancient tradition of photographing the dead. Under his guidance, Dolores will explore this forgotten practice, experience the slow time of the daguerreotype, and our need for images to remember those who are no longer there. She will also discover that some of them hold dark secrets that should never be revealed and, above all, that the dead never cease to move and sometimes pounce on the memory of the living. Miguel Angel Hernandez has written a subtle, dazzling novel about the borders between life and death, about memory and guilt, about the past that stays with us and our constant search for air to breathe.