Mary Pain

Mary Pain’s hit rock bottom with nothing left to lose … but she’s also absolutely free. Mary Pain might just be the patron saint of second chances. Unemployed and all out of options, she buys a one-way bus ticket to the dead-end town she grew up in. Time stands still there—all the same people still telling the same old gossip she’s been running from for ages. Back in her childhood home, she needs to find a way to save the house from foreclosure, care for her ailing grandfather, and make peace with her mother’s ghost, whose telephone calls still come in on the old kitchen landline. With the odds stacked against her, Mary Pain doesn’t let her mid-life rut keep her down: She picks up men for midnight trysts in the park, and remains open to deepening connections with childhood friends, new lovers, and precocious altar boys. Lola Lorente’s slick black inkwork feels sophisticated and voluptuous, and her rendering of townsfolk and their customs is a sensorial delight. Her devoted attention to fabric textures, body shapes, and one-of-a-kind faces brings this cast of oddballs and weirdos, sometimes verging on the grotesque, fully to life. Translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg, Lorente’s English debut is a sorrowful yet hopeful portrait of a young adult at a crossroads in life—a quintessential loser looking for meaning and redemption in a town full of ghosts.