Margarita's Soul: The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty

A man of fifty looks back on the encounter that shattered his orderly life. Roger Bradley is strolling Broadway when a veiled woman steps from the crowd and speaks to him as if they shared a secret. Her name is Margarita, and she is unlike anyone he has ever known: raised in isolation by a retired sea captain, untethered to the social codes that govern the city around her. When she asks Roger to help her "show herself" on Broadway, he makes a decision that will undo him. <br><br>This is not a simple romance. It is a meditation on what it means to be truly seen by another person, and what we risk when we let someone from the margins of our world pull us into theirs. Margarita is strange and beguiling, her speech clipped with unfamiliar rhythms, her history a puzzle Roger cannot stop trying to solve. Through his recollections, we come to understand that some people enter our lives to change the shape of everything that follows. The prose has the hazy, romantic quality of memory itself, as if the narrator is still trying to convince himself that it all really happened. For readers who loved *The Age of Innocence* or any tale of impossible connections across difference.