'A word is enough, like those in the lullaby her mother used to sing, just one word that returns to her memory, caraway.' A lonely girl in an orphanage recalls her mother's lullaby, but the comfort it brings is bittersweet - just like the caraway seed in the old folk song. Forbidden lovers are brought together by poetry, before betrayal tears them apart. A troubled painter writes to his brother, remembering when his brush made magic on canvas. Music transports a dancer beyond the degradations of her daily life. Throughout this collection, beauty and brutality are close companions. The bonds between brothers, between mothers and their children, artist and art, are tested by illness, poverty and war. Yet still, amid these sorrows, characters are transformed by poems, stories and song. Suffused in the traditions of oral storytelling, Irene Reyes-Noguerol shares tales of love in its most enduring forms: patient, generative, sometimes desperate, and bittersweet as caraway.
