Mother-of-Pearl Moons

In this collection, Fina Casalderrey regales us with five stories written in the starry firmament of night. In the title story, a woman moves with her husband to a house in the village, where she plans to give birth, and is approached by a gardener who offers to tend the garden at night. In "Appointment in the Gardens of the South", a descendant of Galician emigrants to Argentina is drawn to a bronze statue whose face he cannot make out, which leads him to dig into his memory. In "Gusts of Mist", a woman walks the Northern Way to Santiago de Compostela in pursuit of happiness. In "Residence Zero", an artist moves to a new housing development in search of space, but finds it unsettling. In "An Ice Cream for Life", a man is shocked to discover that he has no heart. This book is reminiscent of another classic of Galician literature, When There's a Knock on the Door at Night, also available from Small Stations Press. Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's best-known writers of young people's literature. She is a winner of the Spanish National Book Award and Spain's candidate for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (the "Nobel Prize" for children's literature). Two of her novels have already appeared in English: Dove and Cut Throat and Just Imagine, Merche!