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twin time: or, how death befell me

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Poetic, sensuous and witty, Veronica Gonzalez’s debut novel unfolds like a fairy tale spanning the duty hills of Los Angeles and the glittering nightlife of Mexico City. Raised in northeast LA by her widowed father, a baker, Mona has grown up believing her mother died minutes after her birth, and her twin brother was simply given away. Stifled by unnameable doubts as a child, when her father dies, Mona sets off on a quest to discover her long-lost twin. The journey takes her into the labyrinth of her own fabulations about her parents’ lives, and a dreamy Mexico City that exists only as cultural imagination. In the process she encounters a band of Nordic men, her Chinese double, a lascivious giant, and a tribe of feral children. Gonzalez masterfully probes the oddness of Mona’s interior world until it becomes a twisted parable for all kinds of displacement.

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