Post-it Lives (136 pages) was first published in 2007, to critical acclaim. It contains forty-six microstories written about the lives and situations faced by ordinary people on a grey day. The prose is tight, tense and fast-moving. The stories are given musical terms as titles.

In “Tempo Primo”, the narrator plans to have a child that she will call Manuela, or Olivia, or Lela, and whom she will abandon to her fate, in a rubbish container or outside the house of a rich man with a pantheon, and whom she will summon up the warmth and affection to greet thirty years later. In “lento”, a woman works dishing out bread and ready meals in a hypermarket. She receives the attention of Chechu, who stacks shelves in the frozen-foods section, and is depressed, vegan, has the number 25, would like to get to know her and can’t put up with crowds. The narrator decides she would prefer to hook up with someone else, someone who has satellite television and reads a sports newspaper. She’s saving up to get herself a boob job. In “presto vivace”, a man gets tattoos as a way of overcoming his sense of uneasiness, the fact Raquel has left him, he’s crazy about Paula and has the hots for Marta. In “allegro giocoso”, a woman is expecting a child after her partner has died. She keeps on smoking, even though she doesn’t have the money to pay for her habit, picking up cigarette ends from various places, cadging cigarettes from other smokers. In “allegretto”, a woman is obsessed with a famous figure, someone who appears on TV, she even manages to pay ten euros for a letter he once wrote in an auction, and now she’s surfing the net in search of an address she can respond to.

In “ad libitum”, Lonely Monotony is a ballet dancer who belongs to a ballet company with only four dancers, two men and two women. They do not get paid for what they do and have other jobs in an attempt to continue with their wish to dance. Lonely Monotony works in a pub at night. They are even contracted to take part in a dance marathon in the local capital. They dance at four in the morning and are surprised to find there are people there to watch them. In the end, Lonely Monotony decides to emigrate, somewhere she can keep her dreams alive, and will be replaced by someone called Constant Anguish, a painter perhaps… In “prestissimo”, a woman has ambitions that go beyond dating Indie Ramón, whose grandmother owns a pharmacy and whose family get her a job in a travel agency. In the end, the woman succumbs and decides to settle down. In “andante”, a man is thirty-five years old and on his second root canal. He has all sorts of petty concerns, the only thing he’s missing is his partner, whom he won’t be able to take along on his trip into the sky because he’s already reached his weight limit, but he’s hoping to take her next time.

In “pesante”, the narrator has forgotten to take a raincoat when going out and weeps for all the misfortune in the world – the old woman selling withered flowers, the boy in a souped-up BMW who has never learned the meaning of the word “hunger”, for the markets without fish and the rubbish containers with rubbish that won’t fit in the local tips. In “poco espressivo”, a woman meets up with her ex-boyfriend in an Internet café. They chat online, sitting next to each other, and during their conversation the man admits that he had wanted to leave her and had started going out with someone else. The woman leaves the café, feeling empty. In “allegretto agitato”, a woman attends the local gym, where she falls in love with the kung-fu teacher and endeavours to speak to him as he comes out of class only to find out he has a child. She gets rid of the muscle-building equipment she has bought and buys herself a camera instead, since the photography teacher definitely doesn’t have children. In “pomposo”, a woman married someone who was very set in his ways, from a good family. Everything about him was predictable. They had a child, but she ended up living without ambition, feeling like an extension of his body. When he dies, she decides, instead of spreading his ashes on the sea, as he requested, to flush them down the toilet.

In “dolce con sentimento”, the narrator wishes that the text she is writing could be a song about two lovers walking down a distant street, a song that ends in a fury, with jealousy, and that she wasn’t in a police station, having to bear witness to the fact that she saw the lovers together as he was stabbing her in the stomach with a knife. In “più lento”, a woman wonders where all the young men from the bumper cars at the local fairground have got to, the ones she never dared to talk to, hooking up instead with a staid man in eighties clothing. She has lost her original sense of romanticism and her taste for candy floss that sticks to your palate. If she had her time again, she would hook up with one of the bumper car men. In “scherzando”, a woman has only one square metre of desire left in her, even though she is desired by a thousand men. In “pressez jusqu’à la fin”, a woman laments the passing of ten years during which she has recycled plastic instead of recycling her daily routine and has got through three thousand coffees, one thousand four hundred cotton buds in her ears, half a million cigarette ends despite her intention to give up smoking, ten years of letting people push in front of her who feel their time is golden. She confesses this to a priest, who gives her four Our Fathers to say and tells her not to let anyone else push in.

In “strigendo”, a woman has had enough of her husband and their daily routine, lunch with his family and a wedding in the local village. She doesn’t want to put up with him any more, she wants to be in Paris and attract other men. In “molto vivace”, a woman works in a bar, serves customers drinks and sleeps with them for little money. She has one experience of real sexual desire with another woman in the restroom, but in the end her dreams come to nothing and she is dumped in Vigo harbour, having been raped, a stone around her neck. In “con fuoco”, a woman who owns her own apartment has sex with the plumber – she makes love to him, he fucks her. Her life consists in waiting for the plumber to come to her front door. In “rubatto e appassionato”, a woman falls for a man from the south, but in the end they go their separate ways, his wife and her patience having grown tired of so little commitment and so much promise.

In “cedez”, a woman accepts the compliment of a dustman and stops trying to reinvent the man of her dreams. In “stretto molto”, the new plans that will connect the city with its surroundings mean the narrator is forced to sell some inherited vineyards. With the money, the narrator plans to buy all kinds of pills and serums with which to come up with a text to fight against these plans. Life is a spiral. In “molto adagio”, Rafaelito is married to a rich man’s daughter with three BMWs and four university degrees. His secretary-photocopier-coffee-carrier cannot bear him except when it’s time to relieve the tensions beneath his desk at coffee break. In “espressivo”, a woman lives in thirty square metres, while most of her friends have achieved a hundred and thirty square metres. That said, the small apartment she lives in is very luxurious. Next door, there lives a couple (in another thirty square metres). At night, the woman comes home and knocks about with the saucepans, preparing something for her husband/boyfriend/lover, who arrives a little later. They then make love between twelve and one in the morning. This routine enables the other woman to get to sleep. She waits through the day for the sound of their lovemaking, but one day it stops. In a panic, she contacts the estate agent, who informs her that the husband/boyfriend/lover has been killed in an accident. The woman can’t sleep. She feels bereft at the death of a stranger and the loss of her routine. In “tempo di valse”, a woman surrounds herself with perfection – the furniture, appliances, accessories in her apartment – but at night she is faced by her own imperfection, which lies next to her in bed like a husband who suspects his wife is being unfaithful but doesn’t dare broach the subject. The three of them struggle to get by.

In “larghetto”, a woman who works in a spa in the mountains of the Basque Country takes in an artist who is an alcoholic. She wants him all to herself, even if the alcohol kills him. She overhears a conversation on his mobile in which he says he’s fine, he’ll be back soon and “I love you”. The artist locks himself in his room. After two days, they knock the door down and find he’s committed suicide. In “a piacere”, an antique dealer buys up a woman’s grandfather’s old possessions for little money. There is a music box that reminds the woman of her childhood and, at the local fair, she wants to buy it back, but it costs far too much, so she picks it up and tries to make off with it. She gets caught, and the box smashes on the ground. In “con molta espressione”, a woman washes dishes in a provincial casino, but secretly wishes to star in a musical in London. She makes love to one of the waiters, and they have a child, who tries to live out his parents’ ambitions, but ends up getting run over by a lorry. In “loco”, it’s the end of the show, and everyone returns home, feeling uneasy. In “allegro vivace”, a woman abandons her idol, who has been swallowed up by power. In “ritenutto”, a pair of Goths come into the bar where a woman works and order one Diet Pepsi between them. They count out the money and sometimes have enough to share a dish of food. While eating, they kiss and touch each other. One day they come in with a stolen credit card and order everything on the menu, but get caught out and asked to leave. The woman, sick of watching them eat, goes into the kitchen and stuffs herself instead.

In “moderato assai”, a woman wonders what it will be like to win the lottery, but is afraid she’ll end up in the consulting room of an Argentinian psychotherapist, so prefers to cling to the hope of winning the lottery rather than actually winning it. In “grave con moto”, a man has been left by his girlfriend because he doesn’t understand her (he doesn’t understand himself) and makes do with his Citroën 2CV and a song by Lula. In “legato”, a pigeon has died in the light well of a building, and a woman can’t get over the sight of its blood. In “poco mosso”, a woman’s marriage is a farce. The couple make love, but are thinking about someone else. In “subito”, Nino is a heroin addict and has left one woman for another. The woman prefers him to die than to remain in the other’s clutches and takes matters into her own hands. In “poco allegro”, Arantxa has lost her umbilical cord to some thieves, and the narrator is determined to get it back for her.

In “largo”, a woman meets up with her ex in some dive and it is only when she sees herself in the mirror of the restroom, looking so tired, that she understands why he might not want to go back to her. In “rallentando”, Carlitos earns enough to have himself a good life, but prefers to stay with his mother and fund her cocaine habit. In “grave”, there are all sorts of things that a woman would like to do, but she doesn’t dare because her insomnia and sense of duty prevent her. In “molto maestoso”, a woman waits for her ex to modify his little worlds and to reconstruct himself. In “crescendo”, a man visits a sex shop and masturbates in front of a naked woman who turns out to be a TV star, but there’s no one he can tell because he lives alone. In “poco dolce”, a woman desires a man, they make love, but then he marries a woman with dyed blond hair, they have twins and the man works for his father-in-law in construction. In “presto”, a woman goes over all her exes, who are now with someone else, and travels to Barcelona to meet up with her lover, but on the way she hooks up with the guy sitting next to her on the plane, pretending that this is the first time she has done so.

In “impossante”, a patient in a psychiatric hospital proposes to his ex-girlfriend that they swear eternal love and then commit suicide together. She doesn’t want to, so he forces her. He also knocks off a couple of the other patients. Now he plans to profess his love for a shop assistant by slipping a love note under the door. In “gravissimo”, a woman writes to the Magi at Christmas, asking first that her parents won’t fight, then, twenty years later, that her own marriage might be OK or end as quickly as possible because her husband has a lover whom he meets at six monthly intervals, then, another twenty years later, that she might be able to get back together with her husband, who has married someone else, but still continues to have the same lover every six months.

The microstories in Post-it Lives deal with the lives of ordinary people who are struggling to get by, who have failed in love or in their aspirations and seek an outlet. The texts are written in a tense, poetic style. This was the author’s first published work and met with considerable success. The book has been translated into Spanish. The author has gone on to win the Xerais Prize for novels with her novel Periphery and, more recently, the Book Gala Prize for best work of fiction with Natura.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne