Institut Ramon LLull

Many sixteen-year-olds think they know everything, but Anaïs really does, because she’s dead. Her matter-of-factly omniscient narration recounts how her mother was orphaned by a freak accident and raised by her aunt. She tells us how her parents met and formed a family with two daughters with French names, Anaïs and Chloe. Then, with twenty-twenty hindsight, she tells us how their lives veer off course, when a car enters their lane provoking a head-on collision.

Readers are pulled along by Aliaga’s selfassured, solid prose in this kaleidoscopic portrait of the Albiol family, revealed in a wide variety of short chapters that include diary entries and fragments of Anaïs’s fiction, a study of a marriage and of careers, of youthful delusions and chosen family, of ways of living that turn out to be loans whose interest you’ll never be able to pay off.