A beautifully imagined story of love and resistance, by one of the foremost novelists of our age

In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A'ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A'ida's letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But the town is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity assume for A'ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them.

"An exquisitely written and constructed novel." - Sunday Times

"Wrought with a miniaturist's precision." - New York Times

"The record of one restless, committed, brilliant consciousness; a late showcase of astonishing range and depth, which should be read as an epic poem or lyrical essay as much as a novel." - Independent