One of the top books I've read this year. I loved the poetry in her writing and the surreal dreamy atmosphere of the setting, of the characters. It's like one long dream we are reading about. Sleepwalking through life and through relationships.

One book coincidence from the previous book A Tale of Two Cities: no full stops used after prefixes (titles).

"My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I." pg. 1

"Did [the cowboys] gaze out at the infinite sky and miss the absence of kisses and caresses? And did their own troubles disappear in the mystery of space like they sometimes do when I gaze at the galaxies on my shattered screen saver?" pg. 4

"Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered. As a child, I used to cover my face with my hands so that no one would know I was there. And then I discovered that covering my face made me more visible because everyone was curious to see what it was I wanted to hide in the first place." pg. 4

"I looked away and gazed instead at a rusty child's swing that had been hammered into the coarse sand. The seat was made from a battered car tyre and it was swaying gently, as if a ghostly child had recently jumped off it. Cranes from the desalination plant sliced into the sky. Tall undulating dunes of greenish-grey cement powder lay in a depot to the right of the beach, where unfinished hotels and apartments had been hacked into the mountains like a murder." pg. 23

"She screwed up her mouth to make a mock-crying expression and then waved her newspaper at Gomez, who was not so much walking as promenading across the white marble floor towards us." pg. 27

"Rose began to list the names of the pills that had been erased from her medication ritual. She spoke about them as if she were grieving for absent friends." pg. 27

"She is waiting for withdrawal symptoms from the lack of the three pills that have been deleted from her list of medication. So far they have not arrived. Yet she continues to wait for them like a lover, nervous and excited. Will she be disappointed if they don't turn up?" pg. 61

"Who is Ingrid Bauer? What are her beliefs and sacred ceremonies? Does she have economic autonomy? What are her rituals with menstrual blood? How does she react to the winter season? What is her attitude to beggars? Does she believe she has a soul? If she does, is it embodied by anything else? A bird or a tiger? Does she have an app for Uber on her smartphone? Her lips are so soft." pg. 70

"I am far away from shore but not lost enough. I must return home but I have nowhere to go that is my own, no work, no money, no lover to welcome me back." pg. 71

"I had slung a basket bag with leather straps over my shoulder and it chafed the stings, which were now raised welts, a sprawling crazy web of tattoos inked in venom." pg. 76

"Her body. Who is her body supposed to please? What is it for and is it ugly or is it something else?" pg. 82

"I have become bolder. I have to find more courage and purpose and chase my thoughts." pg. 104

"I am so lonely. I am walking on the sand and the tide is out. A woman is galloping on her horse across the burning sand of the playa. A tall Andalusian horse. His mane is flaming his hooves are thundering the sea is glittering. She is wearing blue velvet shorts and brown riding boots and she is holding a giant bow and arrow. Her upper arms are muscled, her long hair is braided, she is gripping the horse with her thighs. I can hear her breathing as the arrow flies through the air and enters my heart. I am wounded. I am wounded with desire and I am ready for the ordeal of love." pg. 107

"I could feel him slipping something to me in his gaze, like a dodgy drug deal in a pub where someone slips a wad of dirty banknotes to someone else. He was threatening me. He was telling me he did not have a high opinion of what he was looking at, that I was someone who must be cut down to size, to a size he could manage to frighten with his eyes, which were the avatars of his mind. He was making me weaker. I had to strike down his gaze, which was his mind, cut off his head with my gaze, just as Ingrid had, more literally, cut off the head of the snake, so I stared right back and slipped my own gaze into his eyes." pg. 123

"When my father and his new wife gazed down at Evangeline I could see the truest love in their eyes, the sort of love that is naked and without shame." pg. 132

"I like the way the satin rests on my hips and slips like a wave between my thighs." pg. 166

"I was beginning to understand Ingrid Bauer. She was always pushing me to the edge in one way or another. My boundaries were made from sand so she reckoned she could push them over, and I let her. I gave my unspoken consent because I want to know what's going to happen next, even if it's not to my advantage. Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?" pg. 175

"Love explodes near her like a war but she never admits she started it. She pretends she has no weapon but she likes the smoke. Love is not all she needs even though she has no one to hold her hand under the stars and say god the moon." pg. 183

"The man is a father. He is standing with his son and he is forsworn to someone else. Perhaps he has snared a woman as enchanting as these young girls, at ease with their bodies, attending to the tangles in their wet hair. He has already been caught but he wants to be caught again. It is a hunt. The only sort of hunt where the prey wants to be jumped on and mauled by its predators." pg. 185

"I am naked apart from the glass sliver near my eyebrow. I no longer want to know what anything means." pg. 185

"Matthew walked towards me, struggling with the box, and kissed me on the cheek. I could tell that his body was cleverer than he was because I liked the feeling of him being close to me. I offered my other insane cheek to his insane lips." pg. 186

"I like how he is not in love with me. I like how I am not in love with him." pg. 187

"While he takes the tiny sliver of glass out of the skin above my eyebrow, I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened." pg. 188

"I am discovering that sleep is for happier people. I am awake all night making my application to complete my doctorate in America. I want to be as far away from Rose as possible. Last night I hammered the keyboard and the sentences found their shape on the shattered digital page under the desert stars. I watched the sun rise. It slips backwards and forwards across the sky but it is the Earth that is moving around the sun, tipping, spinning. I am spinning with it and I am pressing Send."

"Blue is my fear of failing and falling and feeling and blue is the August sky above us in Almeria. . .Blue are her tears and the struggle to live in all the dimensions between forgetting and remembering." pg. 201

"I waded into the sea up to my belly button, which is the oldest human scar, and discovered I was crying." pg. 203

"After that she turned on me. It was a hymn of violence and she sang it to me like a full-throated, evil nightingale." pg. 208

Book: borrowed from Skyline College Library.