Let No One Sleep

In this latest from multiple-award-winning Spanish novelist Millás (From the Shadows), Lucía decides to become a taxi driver after losing her job as a computer programmer. Her conversations with her passengers, a cross section of humanity that includes theater producer Roberta and journalist Ricardo, plus a cancer patient, a blind man, and even her former boss, form the gist of the book’s first part. Lucía is obsessed with reconnecting with Braulio, a former actor and neighbor she only briefly met, and also with Puccini’s Turandot, whose famous aria “Nessun dorma” (the “let no one sleep” of the title) recurs throughout the novel. In her gradual slide into a world of fantasy, Lucía pictures herself as a bird-woman and as Princess Turandot driving through Beijing, rather than Madrid. In the book’s second part, things turn ugly when Roberta, Ricardo, and Braulio abuse her confidences by making them fodder for a play, Lucia takes revenge on them in a macabre and disturbing ending.