Maria Espinosa

Regarded as one of Sand's best novels, Lélia is an important document in the evolution of women's consciousness. Published in 1833, when Sand was 29, it stunned Victorians by advocating the same standard of morality for men and women and by suggesting that both the prostitute and the married woman were slaves to male desire. Sand also questioned monogamy, fidelity, and monastic celibacy. She later made an unsuccessful attempt to revise the book and to expunge its despair and skepticism. Although Sand wrote copiously, until recently only a handful of her books were available in English. This first English translation of Lélia is an excellent rendering, capturing the raptures, the mysticism, and the nineteenth-century flavor ot its eternally fascinating subject.

Against the vibrant and liberated backdrop of 1970's San Francisco, a husband and wife-both Jewish immigrants indelibly traumatized by their childhoods in Nazi Germany-face the turbulence of an increasingly sterile marriage. Saul, an emotionally withdrawn scientist, escapes into New Age mysticism with Shivaya, a self-styled clairvoyant Danish healer. Gerda drifts in and out of psychiatric care as her loosening grip on reality leaves its mark on their teenage daughter, Hannah. In this unflinching portrait of a woman's downward spiral into the nightmare of modern domesticity, Maria Espinosa weaves a deceptively simple tale about the terror of abandonment and the mysterious nature of suffering.

An intense psychological novel, this book focuses on a young woman’s dependence on her husband and her attempts to forge an independent life for herself. Rosa, a frail, sensitive American Jew living in Paris, marries an alcoholic expatriate from Chile and finds herself trapped in a sadomasochistic relationship. Amid a series of fast-moving events—the birth of their daughter, moving to Rosa’s parents’ home and then to Sausalito, California, and various sexual encounters—this narrative explores Antonio’s fears and failures as well as Rosa’s implicit trust in him to direct her life. Ultimately, Rosa begins to question her relationship with her husband and her parents.