Can you believe the things that happen to those Encarna women? No family in the small Spanish town of Canteira has ever given the gossips so much to talk about, so many tragedies and disasters to share on long winter nights. After the absurd but tragic death of her husband, María Encarna, the family's imposing matriarch, turns her granite house into a pensión, opening it up to strangers with their colorful stories of demons and wars.

The pensión is very much a woman's world: there's María, known as María la Reina - the Queen - because of her haughty manner and legendary beauty; María's two unmarried sisters, Cecilia, given to daring culinary experiments and endless melodrama, and Carmen, the Holy One; and María's two daughters, Matilde, lost in a world of the imagination; and Asunción, a great beauty and her mother's favorite - until she marries Manuel Pousada, the town's most notorious sinner,whose true motive is to get closer to the disdainful María, the unwilling object of his perverse longings.

Fueled by the profits of her connection with the contrabandistas, María builds a 50-bed hotel and cafe-bar. Through the Spanish Civil War, a dictatorship, and the beginning days of the new democracy, the Encarna women, now joined by Asunción's entrepreneurial daughter Gloria, become the wealthiest family in the town. Yet despite their success and tenacity, tragedy comes calling, usually in the form of a man'and almost always on a Friday.

In the tradition of Like Water for Chocolate and Antonia's Line, The Bitter Taste of Time is a wondrous, rich and romantic tale of a sweeping history that belongs to a family of remarkable women, a story of passion, pride, love, and war. By turns funny, tragic and touched with a fine sense of magic realism, The Bitter Taste of Time is a hugely entertaining read.

Béa Gonzalez's work has been published in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, T.O. Magazine and Brick Literary Magazine. She has been a finalist twice in the CBC/Saturday Night literary competition. Béa Gonzalez spent several years in Galicia, Spain, while growing up and now lives in Toronto

BÉA GONZALEZ was born in Vigo, Spain, and immigrated withher family to Canada as a child. Following studies in Spain and in Toronto, shecompleted an M.A. in European literary and historical studies at King’sCollege, University of London. Gonzalez also develops and leads cultural toursto Spain and Latin America to study the works of their poets and writers.

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