In the middle of the night, a woman awakens to find a stranger in her bedroom. Though she cannot determine who he is--or, indeed, whether he is even real at all and not just an extension of her dreams or her writing--she is drawn into a conversation with her unexpected guest. What she tells him becomes the story of a woman coming of age in the repressive Spain of the Franco era.

In The Back Room Carmen Martín Gaite spins out a hypnotic evocation of one woman's life counterpointed against the social history of modern Spain. The growth of a personal identity and the terrors of fascism are woven together within the delicate fabric of this dreamlike narrative. The result is an intimate and existential confessional--part autobiography, part fiction. In direct and simple language, Martín Gaite envisions life within a world besieged. This, her finest work, explores the back room of memory with a quiet but irresistible power.

Carmen Martín Gaite was one of Spain's leading novelists. She was the author of numerous works of fiction and criticism, including Variable Cloud and, most recently, The Farewell Angel. The Back Room was the first of her novels to appear in Spain after the death of Franco, and the first to be translated into English. In 1978 it was awarded Spain's National Prize for Literature.

Praise for Carmen Martín Gaite--

"A serious, fascinating work, indeed a great novel . . . leaves its readers mesmerized." - ABC Literario

"Excellently plotted and written with that perfect simplicity that tends to escape notice and which has characterized Gaite's novels from the start. .. . . She has once again made the difficult art of writing into easy reading." - El Mundo

". . . intensely serious, literary and wryly humorous, [her] mesmerizing, labyrinthine sentences induce a sense of wandering the corridors and topiaried gardens of Marienbad." - Sunday Times