A Delicate Collection of Absences

In a modest house live Laura and Margarida, granddaughter and grandmother, bound by a silent and profound love. While the girl experiences the final moments of childhood, between school and playing with her friends, the grandmother devotes herself to reading palms at an antiques fair, striving to maintain the small home she created to protect them from the world.

But the unexpected arrival of Filipa, Margarida's mother and Laura's great-grandmother, disrupts the fragile balance of this intimate coexistence. With her suitcases, silences, and old pains, Filipa occupies the spaces of the house and triggers changes that profoundly alter the daily lives of the three women.

Lost in the first desires and discoveries of her body, Laura feels invisible and out of place. Margarida, overwhelmed by the new demands, finds in Camilo — an old acquaintance from the fair — the support and companionship she needed to continue supporting the family.

In A Delicate Collection of Absences, Aline Bei offers a powerful and delicate novel about the emotional legacies between generations, the weight of care, and the voids that settle in a house — and inside us.