Two women, Mariana and Sofía, whose long and complicated connection returns through correspondence, recollection, fantasy, confession, and suddenly is up to anyone's interpretation. 

The novel has that deliciously unstable European literary quality where plot matters less than atmosphere, voice, and the attempt to reconstruct what really happened between people who remember themselves differently. Gaite moves through psychoanalysis, romance, female self-invention, storytelling, betrayal, adolescence, fantasy, and the slipperiness of confession. There are letters, drawings, fragments, emotional weather systems, and a general sense that the self is less a solid object than something written and rewritten in the presence of another person. 

A good one for readers of Elena Ferrante, Natalia Ginzburg, Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector, and literary fiction about women thinking dangerously hard in rooms.

Harvill Press paperback edition, first published in this paperback format in 1997. First published in Spanish as Nubosidad variable by Editorial Anagrama in 1992. Translated from the Spanish. Good second-hand condition, light handling and shelfwear; includes the author’s own half-title illustration.