The Winterlings

Book excerpt: A reckoning with violent history, the occult, and death set against the broodingly romantic backdrop of the Spanish Civil War’s fallout and Hollywood’s Golden Age, by “one of the most powerful female voices Spanish literature has produced” (La Razón). After a childhood in exile, two odd sisters, known mysteriously as “The Winterlings,” return to their murdered grandfather’s cottage in the Galician countryside and settle into the unchanged routines of rural living. When the sisters learn of nearby filming for Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and the call for Ava Gardner lookalikes, the chance to stand in for the most beautiful woman in the world divides their once-unified passion for Hollywood cinema and acting, threatening to sunder their close relationship. Meanwhile, the insular villagers gradually reveal themselves as grotesque (albeit charming) characters: a widow in perpetual mourning, a woman who never dies and the priest who climbs a steep hill daily to give her last rites, and a dentist who plants the teeth of the deceased in his patients’ mouths. But most unsettling of all is the revelation of the perverse business arrangement the townspeople have made with the girls’ departed grandfather. Enchanting as a spell, award-winning Galician author Cristina Sánchez-Andrade’s novel draws equally from Spanish oral tradition and the American gothic fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson, puncturing the idyllic surface of provincial life and historical codes of silence to expose the darkness lurking underneath.