EL CABELLO DE VENUS

In an asylum office in Switzerland, an interpreter listens every day to those who have escaped from hell. The voices he translates — Russian refugees bearing with them wars, losses, and unspeakable wounds — strike him like a blow: each story is a new weight he carries upon his shoulders. Yet his own life, too, is far from unscathed. Between a love that vanished, a son to whom he can only write in his imagination, and a past rife with absences, he himself begins to crack. In Maidenhair — Mikhail Shishkin’s most acclaimed novel — reality and fiction intermingle in a dazzling portrait of exile and memory. Interviews, diaries, myths, and memories intertwine like threads of a single fabric, where horror coexists with beauty and the written word becomes the only possible refuge.