Set against Mexico City, Ana Clavel’s novel follows Soledad, a young woman whose life begins to loosen from ordinary reality as desire, erotic fixation, death dissolve the border between the material world and what persists beside it.

It's full of ghosts, shadows, projections, doubles, showing how desire makes reality porous, turning absence into something with shape and a thump. The novel has the weird internal logic of a dream without surrendering its psychological sharpness. Images recur — mirrors, photographs, bodies, rooms, darkness — until they begin to behave like a second narrative beneath the first. Soledad’s attempts to understand herself become inseparable from the people she has lost, wanted or imagined, producing a book about identity as something never entirely self-contained. Sensual, uncanny and structurally slippery, it sits somewhere between literary fiction, surrealism and a ghost story that refuses to behave like one.

Alliform Publishing, Minneapolis, 2006. First English-language edition; originally published in Mexico as Los deseos y su sombra in 1999. Paperback. Light shelf wear; internally clean and sound.