Never to Return

"Never to Return" is the story of a middle-aged woman in the throes of a personal crisis prompted by her brief, intense experience with psychoanalysis. On the brink of turning fifty, Elena suddenly falls into a deep depression brought on by her husband's odyssey to New York to celebrate the triumph of his cinematic career, a trip he takes not with Elena but with an unknown lover half her age. At the same time, Elena must come to grips with the transition of her grown-up sons to their own lives and relationships. Fearing aging, loneliness, a failed love, and a failed life, she begins sessions with a reputable Argentine psychoanalyst. As she undergoes treatment, she develops a sharply satiric view of the analytic endeavor and, at the same time, an appreciation of its possible power and effectiveness. A novelist, publisher, and editor, Esther Tusquets has been for several decades a leading figure on the Spanish literary scene. Since the early sixties, she has directed Editorial Lumen, a distinguished publishing house in Barcelona. In the past twenty years, she has become widely known as a writer of fiction. She is best known for a tetralogy of novels, the fourth of which is "Never to Return". Barbara Ichiishi is the author of "The Apple of Earthly Love: Female Development" in Esther Tusquets' Fiction and the cotranslator of Edouard Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint.