Las amantes boreales

Las amantes boreales / The Borealis Lovers

Novel , 2018

Siruela

Pages: 268

Las amantes boreales is the story of the deep, abysmal friendship between Roxana and Fedora, two young girls from Saint Petersburg’s upper middle class, during the most tumultuous and definitive period of Russia’s October Revolution.

After being expelled from the Imperial School of Dance, Roxana and Fedora enrol at Palastnovo, a boarding school full of double meanings and double standards, located on a remote island on Lake Ladoga. Like a counterpoint concert, their voices reach the reader as a series of opposing and complementary stories, in which the lyrical and existential tension turns the text into a subtle exploration of the diffuse boundaries of love, intimacy, learning, and the traps often hidden in what we call fate.

"Irene Gracia is our most secret writer. The characters that inhabit her books are strange and lunatic beings, always full of a dark and melancholic beauty. The dolls that pretend to be human, the drowned beauties, the lost angels, the girls who lose their voice… Reading her novels is like visiting those meadows of truth that the Greeks spoke about." Gustavo Martín Garzo, El Mundo