Well well well if it isn't one of the finest stories I've ever read just waiting for me to arrive. I adored Gonzalez's Difficult Light but I flinched before picking up another by him (bc I am a coward and feared it would be sad or sadder than that excellent book. A very silly reason). This is a crushingly beautiful work and unfolds with a powerful blend of yearning and inevitability. I love so many things about this book, from the intelligent use of narrators to craft the story's themes to the hour by hour structure instead of chapter numbers, but my favorite thing is the sheer balls Gonzalez has to pitch a novel as a cross between King Lear and The Old Man and the Sea... and then to pull it off! Much credit deserves to go to Andrea Rosenberg, who also translated Difficult Light. She has combined the vernacular and the lyrical so smoothly here and really done incredible work bringing this novel to English.

I could go on and on. I haven't even mentioned how powerful the themes resonated with me or how I learned so much about perspective in crafting a story, or how each character is approached with vulnerability and yet each one stays unerringly true to themselves. This is a masterful novel and one I encourage anyone to pick up.