CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Letters from Latin America Leo Boix: September 20, 2023
Reviews of a book of fiction by Colombian writer Margarita Garcia Robayo, a nouvelle by Argentinean author Sara Gallardo and a poetry collection by Argentinean-Spanish poet, novelist and musician Mariano Peyrou
(Left) Margarita Garcia Robayo
[Kaloian-Ministerio de Cultura de la Nacion Argentina/CC]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
THE main protagonist in Margarita Garcia Robayo’s fast-paced novel The Delivery (Charco Press, £11.99) is a young Colombian woman writer living in Buenos Aires who often wears a T-shirt with the words “Rabid Fox” on it.
This is quite telling for a character who enjoys looking at half-finished and empty buildings, is despised by most of her neighbours for being “weird” and who thinks that families “are ambushes” and “flammable places.”
She will suddenly receive an enormous package from her sister that will eventually disrupt her daily life and will make a “fissure” in the real world. Robayo masterfully constructs a story of family ghosts and memories that put into question what it means to leave behind a country, family and friends for a new place.
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