Clean (Limpia) by Alia trabucco Zerán

This is the story of Estela, a domestic servant torn between her working life in the city and the memory of home, between her disgust for her ostentatious and troubled employers – at whose hands she suffers daily indignities – and her unsolved affection for them. When tragedy strikes in the home, previously unspoken class conflicts explode.

The novel begins with an inescapable fact: a girl has died. From there, it explores, in a fictional first-person account, Estela’s daily routine and shows how her apparently simple life turns into a repetitive and ultimately violent nightmare. Constructed in a circular way (the novel starts at the point where it ends), LIMPIA allows us to enter the intimacy of a home, and the power relations that are established there and shows us how invisible and neglected this woman subjected to the "live in maid" regime is. In the tradition of "dirty realism", she talks about the family she looks after, the mother she left behind in the countryside, and the loneliness so deep that her closest relationship is with a stray dog who comes to the house regularly. Her emotional detachment coupled with her anger and her exhaustion propel us forward to the heart of the novel, what happened to the child. (RCW)