A Perfect Cemetery

"His stories shimmer like revelations the clarity, mystery, beauty, depth, and sheer, thrilling peculiarity of ordinary life when the veil lifts. Theyre exhilarating to read, just as exhilarating to re-read." Deborah Eisenberg Childhood does not last long in the Argentine mountains of Crdoba, and adult lives fall apart quickly. In disarming, darkly humorous stories, Federico Falco explores themes of obsessive love, romantic attachment and the strategies we must find to cope with death and painful longing. In the middle of a blizzard a widow watches the ruin of her late-husbands garden, until suddenly she sees a woman running naked in the falling snow. After telling her parents she is abandoning her Christian faith, a girl becomes infatuated with a Mormon missionary who reminds her of a boy killed in her village years before. When his familys home is lost, a father desperately offers his daughters hand in marriage to anyone who will take them in. And a towns mayor tries to fulfill his fathers dying wish to design the perfect cemetery.