The difficulty of being a woman in 21st-century Barcelona and 17th-century Massachusetts might only be a few hundred years.

Fantasies, or are they premonitions, of a great wave, an impending apocalypse, threaten to swamp a young woman in a slowly curdling relationship in Barcelona. From the outside it all looks good--"we have friends who design jewellery, who make politically committed electronic art, who are concerned about their mobile devices being monitored, who talk about climate change"--but her discontent means she's not living up to her part of the bargain. Four hundred years earlier, Deborah Moody marries, loses a child, loses her husband, loses everything, and flees England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But if relying on a husband proved a mistake, independence doesn't mean freedom from the dangerous vanities of men. Funny, cutting, and a savage indictment of the cheap consolations of meme-ified faux feminism, misplaced solidarity, and sacrifices for the supposed greater good, Cautery offers us two women (one real, one imagined) who share one final vision of true happiness--burning it down and beginning again.