The Farewell Angel Author:Carmen Martin Gaite Winner of the Spanish National Prize for Literature. On the day he is released from prison in Madrid, Leonardo learns of his parents' death in a car crash. He returns to their empty town house, a rich young man now, but with a life to reconstruct out of fragments. At first all he wants is to be alone to look over books, diaries, and old photo... more »graphs, the mute witnesses to his own childhood and his parents' wretched marriage. But in time he concentrates on the Quinta Blanca, the white house by the cliff edge where his grandmother used to nourish him on stories, especially Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen." When Leonardo revisits this childhood home at Christmas as the guest of its new owner, Casilda, he, too, has the sliver of ice removed from his heart by the one woman capable of doing so, and his own redemption is at hand. The Farewell Angel is about storytelling, about the determining power of stories to harm and to heal. Centered on a lighthouse and the sea-washed rocks beneath it, this haunting novel is a triumph of subtle narrative by the prize-winning author of Variable Cloud.« less