The Good Works Of Ayela Linde Book

From an O. Henry Prize-winner, this dazzling novel in stories marks the arrival of a powerfully original and beguiling new voice in American fiction.

The linked stories that make up this spare and beautifully written novel follow the life of Ayela, the illegitimate daughter of a Mexican dressmaker, born in 1933 in the Texas border town of Santa Rosalia. Raised by her mother and superstitious grandmother (thought to be a witch by the townsfolk), Ayela is breathtakingly striking, aloof, fearful, flamboyant, and headstrong, and her stories are told by those who know her, or think they do: a girlhood friend, her housekeeper, the pork butcher, members of the altar guild, a travel agent, her daughter-in-law, and others. The stories begin when Ayela is 17 and move through her marriage to an idealistic Bostonian, held captive in town by her beauy and her need, and end with her last and most dubious ""good work"" at the moment of her death. Together they create a portrait, composite yet intriguingly incomplete, that captures the complexity of who she was, for, with Ayela as with the rest of us, that truth lies partly in the eye of the beholder.