Women in Translation Book Club: Restoration (online)

Please note this meeting will be online. There will be a mixture of in-person and online meetings throughout the year.

The Women In Translation reading group provides a free, friendly and gentle environment in which opinions are shared and new appreciations can be discovered. A place for curious minds and relaxed conversation hosted by poet and translator Annie Rutherford.

For November 2026 the book will meet online to discuss is Restoration by Ave Barrera, translated by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers

Please support the bookshop & the book club by ordering your books through Lighthouse, Use the code LONG-VICTORIOUS-WIT for bookclubbers 10% off.

The book:

Propelled by female desire, shaped by the violence of the male gaze, and inspired by the endless vitality of old stories remade anew, Restoration takes on Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez, and Amparo Dávila to produce a novel of obsession, reclamation, and romance gone very, very wrong.

Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room – scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks – the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own.

Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked room?

Restoration is a ghost story with porous borders, between Jasmina and these forgotten women, between the novel and us. And the questions Barrera asks may be about what’s behind our own barred door.