"One of the most original and talented novelists writing in Spanish today." Alberto Manguel With sensuous imagery and musical cadence, renowned Oulipian Eduardo Berti conjures an exquisite, star-crossed love story in pre-revolutionary China. The desires of a young girl, visited in her dreams by her grandmother's ghost, clash with the strict expectations of her parents, exploring the delicate balance between modernity and tradition, mysticism and memory. Eduardo Berti (b. 1964) was admitted to the Oulipo in 2014, becoming the group's first Argentinian writer. In 2011 he won the Emece Prize and the Las Americas Prize for his book The Imagined Land.

Imbued with a magical quality, this elegant fable transports readers to early 20th-century China, a country brimming with ghosts, with weddings between the living and the dead, and with superstitions and ancestral rites. Living in the midst of this is the tale's protagonist, a young girl living in dread of the marriage her parents are attempting to arrange for her. She has eyes only for Xiaomei, the daughter of a blind bird vendor. She and Xiaomei initiate an at-first halting, timid friendship, but in their meetings in the park where the elderly gather with their birds, they discover the importance of what should be spoken and what should be left unsaid, and of beauty and loyalty, which have the power to lift them out of their circumstances.