It seemed to me the state of my soul was a blurry memory of something that had occurred in a place in northern Spain called Ordesa... A man at a crossroads in midlife considers the place where he's from, where his parents have recently died. Amid enormous personal tumult, he sits down to write an unsparing account of his childhood and his life's trials, failures, and triumphs. In unswervingly honest prose, he reckons with the ghosts of his parents and the specters of his divorce, his children, his career, and his addictions. He explores identity after great loss: What is a person without a marriage or without parents? What is a person when faced with memories alone? Already an acclaimed poet and novelist in Spain, Manuel Vilas reaches a brilliant new level with this autobiographical novel, which critics have called "breathtaking," "magnificent," and "a work of art able to cauterize pain." Elegiac and searching, Ordesa is a powerful meditation on what family gives and takes away.