When I first encountered Roig’s novel, in the 1980s, I was struck by the freshness of her tone—and by the fact that Natàlia’s generation was being depicted in a fearless and dramatic way. There was, for example, a sexual frankness in the book that came as a relief in a country where many films had been censored or banned for their sexual content. When Roig portrays characters from the older generation, many of them emotionally and spiritually maimed by the long years of the dictatorship, she is careful to make the gap between them and the new generation complex and ambiguous rather than simple or easy to predict.