by David Trueba. In this new work by novelist/screenwriter Trueba, which won the 2009 Critics Award, much of the background is supplied by the twilight world of Spain's illegal aliens and the international politics of soccer. Ariel, a soccer player from Argentina who watches movies with subtitles and even visits the Prado Museum in his adopted city of Madrid, hits Sylvia with his car on her 16th birthday, injuring her leg. Even as the two become an item, Sylvia watches the lives of her father, Lorenzo, and grandfather Leandro unravel. Her father, abandoned by Sylvia's mother and worn out and overwhelmed, has had his field of action so reduced that the only woman he can find to replace his wife is someone he meets by chance in the stairwell of his tenement. Grandfather Leandro is a weakling sustained by the goodness of his wife, Aurora. But now that Aurora is dying, Leandro consorts with the prostitute Osembe and brings about his financial ruin. Verdict A sparkling intellectual tapestry of youthful exuberance and decrepit old age, kindness and stupidity, and extravagant and abandoned dreams. --Library Journal
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