Anne Hébert's final novel, originally published in French as Un Habit de lumière, is a story of dangerous dreams come true.

Rose-Alba Almevida, her husband Pedro, and her son Miguel live by modest means in a Paris apartment, but each, in their way, dreams of returning home to Spain to reclaim the honor and identity stripped of them by the immigrant struggle. Yet, where Pedro plans and saves for a vineyard plot to which he can retire, Rose-Alba and Miguel have vastly different dreams. For them Spain is an emotional state, where impulse and instinct prevail, where passions are untempered by foreign, unfamiliar values. When a mysterious stranger enters their lives and offers all that Rose-Alba and Miguel seek, the Almevida family is torn violently apart and their innocent dreams become the barbed weapons of their own destruction.