After 25 years away, Mateo Silva has returned to sell his childhood home so he can send his longtime girlfriend—whom he now realizes he may have never loved—on a trip to the Acropolis before her cancer kills her. Mateo sells the home to the first bidder: his wealthy neighbor from childhood, whose wife Graça enchanted Mateo as a young man. It was Graça’s beauty, paired with his father’s unfaithfulness,...

After 25 years away, Mateo Silva has returned to sell his childhood home so he can send his longtime girlfriend—whom he now realizes he may have never loved—on a trip to the Acropolis before her cancer kills her. Mateo sells the home to the first bidder: his wealthy neighbor from childhood, whose wife Graça enchanted Mateo as a young man. It was Graça’s beauty, paired with his father’s unfaithfulness, that broke up his family. But the woman he sees now bears little resemblance to the one he remembers, and you can’t move forward by revisiting the past.

In searing prose, keenly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, the Portuguese master Maria Judite de Carvalho’s narrator is at a crossroads, but too paralyzed to change direction in the life that he no longer seems to control.