Variable Cloud

Sofia is mother of three grown-up children and trapped in a loveless marriage to their estranged father Eduardo, a self-preoccupied businessman. Mariana is a psychiatrist with a successful Madrid practice, a shrewd woman of brittle emotions, incapable of forming stable relationships with men. These two women on the threshold of middle age were close friends at schools but grew apart, one of them inheriting the other's lover. Meeting accidentally at a party, they realise that they retain a deep-felt need to confide in each other. While Mariana escapes Madrid for a coastal resort to seek respite in solitude from a damaged love-affair, Sofia walks out on her husband and finds refuge in her children's chaotic apartment. The two women fill notebooks with their insights and recollections and engage in a correspondence in which they lay bare their souls. They pool these deeply dredged findings about themselves and discover, as they realise on meeting again, that they have written a novel ... Variable Cloud a probing, limpid, cruelly witty dissection of married (and unmarried) life in all its absurdities and self-deceptions. Here is a brilliant - and chilling - exercise in self-awareness.