Eliete is a normal woman in her early forties, born just after the Carnation Revolution. There is hardly anything extraordinary about her life, and yet she enthralls us with her desire to live, and to understand people and things. Her daughters are mostly on the internet and abroad; her husband is easier to meet on Facebook than at home. Who cares if Eliete, who feels strongly that her youth is gone, allows herself to experiment on Tinder? She would prefer to reignite her relationship with her husband, but he doesn''t seem interested. Eliete stays cool and doesn''t despair. Then suddenly she finds someone and something different - an inkling of love? Is Duarte a real-life version of one of the heroes in the teenage magazines of her childhood? And what on earth does it mean when her dementia-suffering grandmother says that Portugal''s former dictator is part of their family story? With precise language and acute psychological insight, Cardoso creates a multifaceted character of great strength. Ironic, but by no means distanced, Eliete reflects on an apparently ordinary life against the background of a three-generation story of the 20th and 21st century in Portugal.

Vorwort
The blistering, brilliant story of an everywoman on the edge of a life-changing crisis. A sassy, cerebral summer read from one of Portugal's best-loved novelists.

Autorentext
Dulce Maria Cardoso is a Portuguese writer, who spent her childhood in Luanda, Angola after her parents moved there when she was an infant. Her family returned to Portugal following the Angolan War of Independence in 1975. She studied law at the University of Lisbon and worked as a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. Her first novel, Campo de Sangue, won the Grand Prize Acontece de Romance, Violeta among the Stars won the EU Prize for Literature and O Chão dos Pardais won the Portuguese Pen Club Award.

Klappentext

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

Eliete is forty (-something)
Eliete has been married to Jorge for twenty years
Eliete has an average career as an average estate agent
Eliete has a completely normal life
Eliete has reached breaking-point

Eliete is stuck in both a dead-end job, and a dead-end marriage. She's never had many grand dreams or ambitions, but now she is starting to wonder if life might have passed her by, and if it's too late to do anything about it.

So, Eliete decides to join Tinder. She sets up some fake dating profiles, and embarks on a number of liaisons with various men around suburban Lisbon. Will this ignite her marriage with the spark it so desperately needs? Unlikely. It is the summer of 2016: Jorge has become hooked on Pokémon Go!, there's football on the telly, he's got opinions on Brexit, and he remains completely oblivious to his wife's new exploits.

And then, in the middle of all of this, Eliete's grandmother is diagnosed with dementia, and moves in with them. Alarmingly, her illness seems to have resurfaced some scandalous personal memories, and her unguarded outbursts threaten to reveal explosive, long-buried family secrets. Secrets that suddenly turn Eliete's perception of herself upside-down, as her seemingly normal life collapses around her . . .

Translated from the Portuguese by Ángel Gurría-Quintana