Published after the author's death, this short novel follows Ana Magdalena Bach, a married woman in middle age who each August travels by ferry to a Caribbean island to lay flowers on her mother's grave. During one of these trips she unexpectedly begins a brief affair, and the yearly journey becomes a time of self-discovery and freedom. Over several Augusts, she looks at her marriage, her desires and her sense of who she is. It is a quiet, sensual work about independence and midlife, and it offers a late glimpse of the author's imagination.