A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published. At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be "structured" by Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue between a god-like author who infuses the breath of life into his creation: the speaking, breathing, dying creation herself, Angela Pralini. The work's almost occult appeal arises from the perception that if Angela dies, Clarice will have to die as well. And she did.

Clarice Lispector (1925-1977), the author of such works as Near to the Wild Heart, The Hour of the Star, and The Passion According to G. H., is the internationally acclaimed novelist and short-story writer from Brazil.

A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector's, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

Leigh McCaulay left Jamaica for New York at fifteen following her parents' divorce. In the wake of her mother's death fifteen years later, she returns to the island to find her estranged father and the family secrets he holds. In Jamaica she encounters the familiarity of home along with the strangeness of being white in a black country, and struggles with guilt and confusion over her part in an oppressive history of white slave owners and black slaves.

As Leigh begins to make an adult life on the island, she learns of her ancestors—Zachary Macaulay, a Scot sent as a young man to be a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation in 18th century Jamaica who, after witnessing and participating in the brutality of slavery, becomes an abolitionist; and John Macaulay, a missionary who comes to Jamaica in the 19th century to save souls and ends up questioning the foundations of his beliefs.

Part historical and part contemporary literary fiction, loosely based on the author's own family history, Huracan explores how we navigate the inequalities and privileges we are born to and the possibilities for connectedness and social transformation in everyday contemporary life. But it is also the story of an island's independence; of the people who came (those who prospered and those who were murdered); of crimes and acts of mercy; and the search for place, love and redemption.

Silence is a tradition among the women of Rita's family, so it is no wonder that she must interpret for herself what her mother has left unsaid about the horrors of the Terezin concentration camp. But Rita faces a silence of her own: a Peronist militant in 1980s Argentina, she has been incarcerated and abused in Buenos Aires's infamous Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) detention center. In an imagined dialogue between mother and daughter, Rita recreates Tinkeleh's unarticulated story, interweaving it with memories of her own childhood. Breaking with the tradition of women as silent observers, Rita speaks not only for the nameless victims who have disappeared under Argentina's military dictatorship but those of the Holocaust. Fingueret's trenchant novel of survival transforms silence into a cry for justice that cannot be stifled.

Argentine author Manuela Fingueret is a storyteller, poet, journalist, essayist, and editor. She lives in Buenos Aires.