ABOUT
THE BOOK

This is a vividly imagined historical novel by one of Mexico’s new literary stars.
Joaquin Buitrago, a photographer in the Castaneda Insane Asylum, believes a patient, Matilda Burgos, is a prostitute he knew years earlier. His obsession leads him to explore the clinic’s records, and her tragic history. Joaquin and Matilda begin to tell each other fragmented stories about a past they almost shared, and a future in which they do not believe. Set in 1920’s Mexico, this novel is at once an overview of one of the most turbulent times in Mexican history, a love story, and a meditation on the ways in which medical and popular language defined insanity.