Mary Pain might just be the patron saint of second chances. Unemployed and all out of options, she buys a one-way bus ticket to the dead-end town she grew up in. Time stands still there—all the same people still telling the same old gossip she’s been running from for ages. Back in her childhood home, she needs to find a way to save the house from foreclosure, care for her ailing grandfather, and make peace with her mother’s ghost, whose telephone calls still come in on the old kitchen landline.
Translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg, Lorente’s English debut is a sorrowful yet hopeful portrait of a young adult at a crossroads in life—a quintessential loser looking for meaning and redemption in a town full of ghosts.