Restoration by Ave Barrera

Propelled by female desire, shaped by the violence of the male gaze, and inspired by the endless vitality of old stories remade anew, Restoration takes on Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez, and Amparo Dávila to produce a novel of obsession, reclamation, and romance gone very, very wrong. Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room – scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks – the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked room? Restoration is a ghost story with porous borders, between Jasmina and these forgotten women, between the novel and us. And the questions Barrera asks may be about what’s behind our own barred door.

A sunburned ghost story from a break out novelist.

REVIEWS

"Restoration is a thriller, not only thematically but - equally powerful - stylistically: Ave Barrera writes the same way Min engages in her restoration work: taking care of every word, every detail, as if it were a question of 'contradicting death'." - Literal: Latin American Voices

"An astonishing novel [...] entrancing." - Southwest Review

"A vibrant and singular voice, combined with an extraordinary technical maturity and a fascinating symbolic density." - Irene Vallejo, author of Papyrus

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback with French flaps
Publisher: Charco Press
ISBN: ‎ 978-1917260022
Pages: 258