Of Beasts and Fowls

Summer ends, the season changes, and Coro, an artist frightened off by what her own paintings may represent, gets in her car and drives for hours in the middle of the night until she chances upon Betania, an isolated house existing in a world of its own. It''s an unfamiliar place inhabited exclusively by women who, strangely, all seem to know her. Like adherents of an ancient cult, the women of Betania all dress the same, carry out strange rites and celebrations, and live alongside goats and innumerable dogs against a landscape dominated by an immense, imposing mountain that seems to block out the sunlight. Theirs is a hierarchical, closed, and restless universe where - as the other women tell her and despite her attempts to escape the area - Coro may finally discover what it means to be part of something. A ''Hotel California'' of the human heart, Pilar Adon''s Of Beasts and Fowls is a novel about the things that we do without knowing why, but that have an explanation that perhaps we will some day come to understand.