El jardín de vidrio

The elderly Tamara Pavlovna rescues little Lastochka from an orphanage during the grayer years of communism in Moldova. What at first may seem like an act of mercy hides a terrifying reality. Lastochka has been bought to work as a slave collecting, for almost a decade, bottles on the streets of the city. She survives in an environment marked by violence and misery while she rejects the advances of overly stubborn men. "The Glass Garden" is an exercise in domestic exorcism. A letter imagined by a girl for unknown parents, in which the pain caused by abandonment, heartbreak and the absence of tenderness and emotion is shown as a wound that may never fully heal. The lack of mercy, the immense stylistic delicacy and the kaleidoscopic writing of Tatiana Tîbuleac make this novel a tragedy that is as cruel and compassionate as it is revealing of what destiny and its beauty have in store for us.