The Pinochet years continue to inspire Chilean writers and Space Invaders (2013, tr: Natasha Wimmer, 2019) by Nona Fernández is one further addition to that canon. Here it’s a short fragmentary work that explores a group’s memories of the time they were schoolchildren in the mid-80s and one of their friends, Estrella, was withdrawn from school and never seen again.

As it’s a group’s memories, much of the writing is in the first person plural but individual characters also get their say (“sometimes we think it’s a memory creeping into our dreams…”) as each person’s experience of the missing girl is, like their interactions, different. Thus the book is somewhat feverish, drifting in and out of singular and collective moments.

The Space Invaders of the title is a recurring theme throughout, be that as imagining the kids at school arranged in formation to salute the raising of the Chilean flag. Or, as their education and awareness of the world increases, their propensity for resistance and revolution, forming wave after wave of attack for a regime that must eventually fall. Even the book’s structure is given over to the arcade classic with its three lives and the inevitable ‘Game Over’.

The history is indisputable, its characters real people, its nature biographical, and yet a disturbing air of unreliability sweeps through the pages as if capturing the whispers and haziness of a childhood under military dictatorship. What facts there are still generate questions for those that lived through such times many years later such is the intersection of the notorious and their innocence.

In reading ‘Space Invaders’ I was reminded of Ricardo Romero’s oblique The President’s Room (2015, tr: Charlotte Coombe, 2017: Charco Press), a book focused on neighbouring Argentina’s regime, both for its brevity, and its metaphorical and dreamlike addressing of a dictatorship’s enduring presence in young lives. And both, like the eponymous game, are addictive page turners haunted by national history. That is to say the past invades a space in a collective consciousness.

Attention (for those of us who hadn’t been looking that way) turns to Annie Ernaux after her Nobel Prize win and to the body of work that got her there. A Man’s Place (1983, tr: Tanya Leslie, 1992) is the story of her father, a man for whom literature, despite the writer’s attempts, can’t stretch itself to fully express.

In trying to capture “a life governed by necessity” Ernaux notes that she has no right to embellish or sensationalise her father’s story and therefore favours neutrality, a trait that comes naturally. Certainly her delivery is distant, he has neither name nor face here, though she is concerned ultimately with something deeper, more inscrutable: his nature and purpose.

Her father, by this account, lived an unremarkable life. Born in rural Normandy, taken from school into work by his father, and a career from farmhand to shopkeeper across the span of two world wars. He’s a man moved by the times, not one that moves with them. A man who holds himself back, ashamed by his past and making of himself an outsider in the burgeoning middle class. A man that puts limits on his existence as he worries what others think and, worse, may say.

Ernaux does not have a perfect memory. She struggles to pull moments from the past (“Memory resists.”) and her vignettes are broken up with reflections on her struggle to produce the work, noting the limits of literature or how involuntary memories – not personal moments – are needed. Indeed, the personal is sidelined: for all her ‘I’ and ‘my’ there’s little feeling on show.

While we see social change, rural lives changed by industrialisation, Ernaux gives us the gaps that open in generations and the speed of change. The grandfather that could neither read nor write had a granddaughter who entered academia and read Proust. And her father could have made more of life without his own self-imposed barriers.

But was he happy? She doesn’t have the answers and can only speculate from select quotes and actions as to the depths of the man who was closest to her. However by putting him on the page he is preserved in a literary state, belonging now to his daughter’s bourgeois world, “the world that had scorned him”.

It only takes two mirrors to build a labyrinth, said Borges, and in The Carnivorous Plant (2021, tr: Laura McGloughlin, 2022) metaphorical mirrors are hung “in front, behind, above and below” to construct an inescapable maze from which its victim, Andrea Mayo, is in search of an exit. Mayo, it should be said, is a heteronym for Flavia Company, an Argentine writer who first introduced the character in a short story collection and now lets her creation speak.

Mayo’s delivery is short, sharp and rhetorical, as if written in snatched moments. Grouped into sections exploring aspects of the the book’s central relationship (rage, violence, humiliation, etc), the book is a maze of chapters and fitful vignettes that provide context (“You haven’t the slightest idea what it’s like.”) to the toxic experience at the book’s heart. This is a book of first chapters all coming from various angles and cumulatively dissecting a balance tipped in favour of power over love.

The idea of a trap is that we enter them unwittingly and that’s how Andrea has found herself with Ibana, her wife of two years. Ibana is the titular plant, a well-worked metaphor for an abusive partner, but Andrea feels complicit in her own degradation (“I shouted the lie that everything was fine so loudly that it was impossible to hear the shoves, the slaps, the insults, the slamming doors.”). Yet the book is something of a triangle, as the presence of Ibana’s child, who lives with them, suggests further tragedy. The carnivorous plant can only manage one prey at a time, we are told. Were Andrea to escape, what fate the child who craves her mother’s attention?

Awash with metaphors, circling its major plant riff, we see Ibana as a praying mantis, a hammer, a sect, and more. But Mayo also paints her as ultimately human, insecure, her actions rooted in her past now projected on to others. Here the old adage of ‘it’ll never happen to me’ bursts, showing just how universal abuse is and how easily anyone can enter such traps (“They make themselves experts on you”). Mayo’s story is an engrossing and harrowing warning, easily digestible, and when the book snaps shut, you can safely leave it while it may not leave you.

Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris (2005) is an epic fantasy but also, unlike much in this vein, a standalone. I’d be lying if it weren’t the major appeal in choosing this over the commitment of multiple book sagas. It follows the story of three characters: Prince Raodon, heir to Arelon’s throne; Sarene, Princess of Teod and, by political arrangement, his bride-to-be; and Hrathen, a religious emissary mandated to convert the people of Arelon.

The city of Elantris is a once magical place where the citizens practised magic and were seen as gods. However following an incident – the Reod – it fell ten years before and is now used as an open prison to new Elantrians. The twist: anyone can be an Elantrian. A magical conversion dubbed the Shaod doesn’t discriminate in its random afflictions, which effectively renders people as a conscious zombie, a true living dead.

Ahead of his wedding Raodon suffers the Shaod and is secretly exiled to Elantris. By dint of contract, Sarene’s wedding is still valid and she takes her place in Arelon society, or rather she rebels against it, bringing sensitivities from a more liberal society where women are less oppressed. And Hrathen skulks around in the shadows, pursuing religious imperialism, something he already has form in following the recent conversion of another fallen land.

For all its plotting: political manoeuvrings, holy skullduggery, and the hint of magic on the horizon, I don’t remember when I last read a book experiencing both genuine intrigue and cosmic indifference. Its world and presentation and mysteries kept me turning pages, but my complete lack of interest in the characters meant I wasn’t turning them all that fast.

For me it’s the prose, which is effectively a catalogue of actions with details of what so-and-so thought. And maybe that’s the problem, too much telling what people think over letting them think. But it’s also the people who are somewhat stock. Our fated couple are perfect in almost every way (he’s ever benevolent; she’s feisty and better than all) with only Hrathen being somewhat interesting. The wider story is decent, with plenty of twists and turns, and though it builds to be magical, it wasn’t magic.

What Will It Take For Me To Leave (2019, tr: Kat Storace, 2021) by Loranne Vella is one of the first offerings from Maltese specialists Praspar Press. It’s a set of short stories dealing with daily rhythms, the unseen thoughts and troubles hidden in the people we meet each day. Most stories are fragmentary pieces that dip into the minds of unnamed everyday people and their massively small concerns. 

From the opening poem (Everyday Verbs) questioning the daily routine, there’s a sense that the past is snapping at the present’s heels, be that unfinished business or preserved memories threatened with modern truths, such as Cup of Coffee where an emigre due to meet an old fancy for a coffee decides to preserve memories of more innocent times rather than face the truth of a person changed by time and experience as he himself has changed.

Stories also emerge from objects – a jigsaw, a comb – and these connect people to their parents and the repetitive tasks they leave behind, dead or alive. The story that gives the collection this English title (Disappearing Act) imagines the courage to leave the sort of everyday cycle that other stories depict but seems ultimately to chime with Beckett’s line from The Unnamable (“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”).

It all adds up to a sort of quotidian horror, where anxieties buzzing through a person’s head each day – about their lives; their bodies; their place in the world – are amplified within the perspectives shown. In bed, one person has downtime to overthink their day (Night), while others wake to sweat-wet sheets after a night of unsettled dreams. Others worry about the availability of time. One woman (in Layer by Layer) psyches herself up to face the day by applying layers of make-up and perfume like armour though it’s ultimately just a mask.

The final vignette (Crossing the Threshold) brings a surprising end to the collection, effectively delivering an epiphany that ties all that’s gone before. It’s almost as if Vella herself, stepping out of her stories, has found a way out of the mundane, recognising that deep down, we’re all inescapably lonely and that pushing on, in spite of everything, is to be celebrated.

The Green Man of Eshwood Hall (2022) is the first of an unknown number by Jacob Kerr set in Northalbion, a fictional spin on Northumberland. Set over 1962, it’s a mostly enchanting tale of a young girl who spends her spare time in the woods near her new house and the discoveries she makes.

Eshwood Hall has been occupied by the Claibornes, the only surviving member living upstairs, mostly confined to bed. Around her a skeleton crew works tending the garden and cooking meals. It’s into this employ the Whipper family come, with peripatetic odd-job man Ray’s family once more uprooted to the whims of his work. With him is his wife Gerry, who suffers an undisclosed heart issue, the younger children Annie and newborn Raymond. And forced to truant to assist her mother is thirteen year old Izzy, whom the narration, joyfully sprinkled with Northumbrian dialect, hovers mostly over. 

When Izzy takes to the woods she meets the eponymous Green Man, a somewhat ambiguous character delightfully fluid in his seemingly corporeal form of leaves, branches, and berries. Though he seems genial in his willingness to assist Izzy with her problems in exchange for something, there’s echoes of WW Jacob’s classic short, The Monkey’s Paw, as his bargains and their results are not always as intended. 

The prose is lyrical, observing nature wonderfully, a rich awareness of flora and fauna and how the seasons change them, but finds no deeper beauty or cause for reflection. There’s a lovely section of May Day celebrations with much English folk tradition on show. And the folksy delivery of the tale brings a real sense of listening to a storyteller with all eyes on him.

Overall it feels like an enchanted adventure in folk horror drag, and when the horrific does spill out, there’s a nice ambiguity to it all. But the book is somewhat patchy, meandering this way and that, its focus and tone shifting. Maybe the book’s underlying focus is somewhat ecological, about destroying rural lands and dooming longstanding ways of life, and serves to highlight that nature is still out there, on the edges of civilization, with the power to enchant us, but we keep building and pushing it away.

When James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) arrived on the scene, it must have felt like a massive fuck you to much that had gone before. Regular anthologies of ghost stories harked to a pre-war cosiness that surely had no place in a post-war Britain. With this debut, Herbert rewrote the rules and the modern pulp horror novel. Certainly it spawned imitators, with humanity soon fighting off, among other things, waves of slugs, worms, and crabs long into the 80s.

Unashamedly violent and lurid, The Rats sees London’s neglected docklands become the breeding ground for a class of rat that’s bigger, stronger, and deadlier than anything that’s gone before. At first they prey on those nearby but their attacks soon widen, becoming a metropolitan issue that escalates to national attention.

In context, The Rats entered the national consciousness a few years after Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech and shows a country adapting to immigration though not without an accompanying febrile atmosphere. Herbert, in the book’s moments of social consciousness, looks past isolating mass-immigration and puts the blame squarely on everyone. Institutions; local and national government; authority in general. But everyday people too, lost in political apathy. “Wasn’t that what Original Sin was supposed to be about? We’re all to blame.”

The hero – Harris, an art teacher – is a blank slate in comparison to most in the book, drawn into the tale when one of his pupils is bitten. As our guide through the crisis, his everyman quality is in stark contrast to those who die. In a few pages Herbert paints their life and we intuit how their death will affect those they leave behind. It’s a nice emotional touch to a form that rarely questions the personal impact of such devastation. And Herbert is quick to ensure that readers know that nothing is out-of-bounds here. Men, women, babies, animals…his rats attack indiscriminately.

For all its impact, The Rats is a debut by someone still with ropes to learn. Plausibility issues; perspective jumps; and lost opportunities for emotional impact plague it as much as its titular menace. Its plotting arguably plays second fiddle to its grand set pieces that, in their variety, bring a sense of scale to the issue. And even in its draggier moments, its brevity ensures a quick pick-up of the pulpy pace as it sniffs out new horrors. But it’s a brutal assault, full of raw anger, and rightly an inimitable classic, no matter how many have tried.

If James Herbert’s debut The Rats was a flawed horror classic, then his follow-up, The Fog (1975), seemed to right some of those wrongs while serving up more of the same. It’s a disaster thriller punctuated by trademark chapters where more horrific stuff showcases the nature of the threat. In this case it’s an odd fog that escapes from an earth fissure and rises into the atmosphere and is pushed around by the wind.

Starting rural, and drifting over villages, the core threat is that the fog will eventually reach London, a high stakes situation as those who find themselves within it are likely to be driven mad, turning to suicide, murder, or sexual perversion. Within this destruction we get several scenes where a victim is given a backstory before their untimely death. Some may have seemed ridiculous at the time but feel almost prophetic now, such as a pilot who flies his plane into a tower.

If an art teacher brought into a government’s confidence was implausible in The Rats then at least when the call comes, John Holman, our everyman hero, is a government employee in the environmental sector, low-level enough to punch up with gripes at how power is managed: the complexity of its structures; protecting itself from prosecution; lying to the public. His elevation to higher circles comes via an immunity to the fog’s influence, meaning he can move safely within it without risk.

The novel is a similar retread to The Rats, if not in threat or overall storyline, but in formula. It lacks the bite of its predecessor; political anger is there but less strident. Though it’s a shame that Herbert devotes more time to his walk-on characters’ lives and their credibility than to the hero, a cardboard cutout in comparison. And the less said of his partner the better.

While Herbert’s meat-and-two-veg prose often lacks vim and polish, the book’s reputation is built on its grim set pieces. Most notorious being a scene where Bournemouth’s residents walk into the sea, the conclusion to a chapter delivered with an ironic sting. Overall the novel is asking questions why humans do bad things to each other: personal, political, and so on. Like the fog, it’s still a grey area.

Thomas Hinde was the pen name of Sir Thomas Chitty, novelist for thirty years before ditching fiction for books on English country gardens and other pastoral pursuits. The Day the Call Came (1964) was his seventh novel and, while I’ve no idea if it’s indicative of his oeuvre (they’re mostly out of print), it was reissued in 2013 and, even over the last decade, has garnered scant appreciation. The eagle-eyed foreword by Ramsey Campbell discusses its impact on his own work and cites it within his own survey of “great horror novels not usually regarded as such”.

It’s more a thriller, with the escalating tension on a sunny suburban scale rather than the high danger espionage thrillers among its contemporaries a la Deighton and Le Carre. The narrator, Harry Bale, late thirties and married with two kids, is a seemingly normal chap who one day receives ‘the call’. It’s no more than a note tucked in an envelope with the typed words ‘STANDY BY’, but it’s all that’s needed to activate him, as if he’s some sleeper cell that has long awaited instructions.

His mission however is unclear and Bale eyes the world around him, interpreting everything as possible instructions, finding meaning in potentially innocuous events. Where casual conversation is interpreted with heightened meaning and never at face value, we’re never quite sure of Bale’s intentions when he tells us that he knew what he had to do. Living within Bale’s head for the duration of the novel reveals a melting pot of conspiracy and suspicion delivered with surface-level sanity. While his explanations are obtuse and he tells us of how things were, we can never truly believe him, and, worse, never truly know what he’s thinking even when he tells us. 

Although not without humour, the dread that builds up over the course of the novel hangs on every page. As Bale recants conversations and voices suspicions we wonder if there’s meat there or if his psychosis is besting his rationality. In this sunshine-soaked tale the light can’t reach the darker parts of its paranoid mind and the mystery that creates is all the more interesting. It leaves us to make a call of our own: how to rationalise Bale and select the truth.

In an age of wearable and smart technology John’s Eyes (2021), a novella by Joanna Corrance, imagines a near future where eyes can be wholly replaced with artificial versions. This isn’t the retinal implant of today, but a new tech that bonds with its wearer and learns on the hoof. Indeed, whatever AI is programmed into these eyes acts as the narrator.

John, blind for several years, receives these eyes, and much of the story is based around how the nascent technology learns to cater for its host. Their seeming sentience interprets and learns from John’s needs and desires, making adjustments to how he views the world, adapting light and colour, like Instagram filters, to affect mood or iron out flaws.

Handing autonomy to technology, though, is not without its risks as the eyes, innocent of human mores and protective of John; effectively mollycoddle him. The actions taken, though he doesn’t realise it, affect his relationships, with family, friends, and his partner.

For its brief length (under eighty pages) the book packs its ideas in, reflecting on how tech imperceptibly affects our lives; on facing down depression; and how assumptions of what makes people happy can have the opposite effect. While the eyes believe they are one with their host, they fail to see the gulf between humans living by instinct and machines by process.

While this understanding gap could be a comedy of errors – the eyes’ naive perception of humans, admittedly repetitive and unsubtle here – there’s a satisfying darkness to the conclusion that supposes, with AI in the future, that the optics don’t look good.

When we first meet the eponymous character of Maithreyi Karnoor’s debut, Sylvia (2021) she’s a freelance travel writer working on an article about baobab trees in India. These trees, with their bulbous trunks and “clawing branches”, have stood for over a thousand years, their seeds having been transported from Africa by long-forgotten migrants. Similarly, her uncle Bhaubaab is from Tanzania and has retraced his grandfather’s Goan heritage in search of a home. The play between baobab and Bhaubaab sets up a clear contrast between something securely rooted in time and a man looking to root himself but is also just one of many puns that feature in an experimental novel that’s breezy to read but rewards a slower approach.

The book takes the form of the baobab with the chunkier first part comprising a single tale that acts as a base for the latter half, a series of nine intertwined short stories that represent the branches. In these, the Sylvia we see visiting her uncle comes and goes, passing through others’ lives  – as friend; as colleague; as wife – and the indelible marks left along the way. Admittedly, it can be confusing to bring these stories together, given their non-linearity and subtle references to each other, but it’s a solvable jigsaw asking some effort from the reader.

However, given Karnoor’s obvious penchant for wordplay, there’s another Sylvia resonating through the book, and that’s the forest that surrounds the villages, providing an ecological angle. Beginning with well-water affected by landfill, we see the encroachment of civilisation on a way of life once isolated within the forest. Deforestation leads to roads and gated communities; it leads to the loss of traditions and cultures. When Bhaubab, on capturing a snake says “it does not need to die for being in my way”, it feels like a plea for the forest against the entropy of progress.

It’s a novel that seems to be about so much that it sometimes feels like it’s about nothing. Karnoor touches on religion, superstition, motherhood, depression, poverty, class, traditions, social media, and more, but ultimately, in a few recurring motifs, it’s about the idea of home and how its characters, whatever their experiences, find their individual comfort. Home, as Bhaubaab learns is “an ephemeral idea”. Such temporary comforts nourish as the book celebrates the minutiae and meaning of our lives against a more cosmic scale.

But being sustained on a melting pot of ideas doesn’t always make Sylvia an engaging work. A lack of immediacy in the later stories keeps us some distance from the action and the seemingly random order of the tales brings cloudiness to a book full of blue skies. However, the prose is light and colourful, and positively bristles with enjoyable wordplay (“Heresy and hearsay are closely connected.”). Where an older Sylvia worries that her medication is suppressing “the springs of kaleidoscopic imagination”, it seems Karnoor has had no problem tapping their source.

I’ll Do Anything You Want (2013, tr: Maruxa Relaño & Martha Tennent, 2023) by Iolanda Batallé is the tale of Nora, a painter who, after twenty-five years in a regular marriage, goes astray with a man she meets on a plane. It’s a thrill that brings her marriage into focus (“Neither of them made an effort. The man bored her.”) and her decisions from there take her through the looking-glass into a world far removed from staid family life: that of high-end prostitution.

“Nora lived where everyone with a family lives, on the edge of an abyss”, writes Batalle, and as she falls into it, we see initial uncertainty grow into confidence with each encounter. What may at first have been a sexual awakening becomes a journey of discovery ending in liberation. As a painter, she finds inspiration in her johns and looks to make an exhibition (“McCullers said that writing was her way of earning her soul…[Nora] did the same with her painting.”) stirred by her trysts.

Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a prominent reference, against many other touchstones, paraphrased as “only by loving all things can one survive great heartbreak”, effectively a mantra against the matrilineal norm that saw both her mother and grandmother remain committed, to the end, only to their husbands. “Nora,” we’re told, “had decided to follow desire wherever it led her”, an apt survival method as ”death begins when desire ceases”.

For all its sex and desire, this is not ‘fifty shades’ erotica, but a literary exploration of love, told in an engaging style that drifts freely through its characters’ minds, with recurring thoughts and images gaining clarity with each wave, and full of reflections (“We all arrive at our knowledge of love by having loved a few people.”) on love and what it truly means.

Of all the people in Nora’s life, her deceased parents, and her independent daughters, there are ultimately three key men that come into sharp focus: her pimp, her husband, and the grandfather who raised her. Each have secrets that the narrative eventually unlocks and their combined impact leads a woman who “had never really made any decisions about her life” to take control and find her worth.

In 1859 Jules Verne left France for the first time and visited Scotland. He looked over Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat (his first ‘mountain’), visited Glasgow, and took the train to Loch Lomond and on, via coach, to the scenic Trossachs, which he was anxious to see. Along the way he learnt of local history and folklore. It’s from this five day trip that the inspiration for The Underground City (1877; tr: Sarah Crozier, 2005) comes, one of a few of Verne’s many novels to be set wholly or partially in Scotland.

Other translations have rendered the novel as Black Diamonds or, more famously, The Child of the Cavern. Its original French title ‘Les Indes noires’ nods to the importance of coal in Britain at the time. And it’s a coal mine and its workers that drive this curious, if somewhat dull, romantic adventure from Verne.

When it opens the mine at Aberfoyle has been closed for ten years but one family staying on discovers a new seam that in turn leads to the discovery of a large underground cave system, under Loch Katrine, stretching all the way to Irvine on the west coast, encouraging miners to pick up their picks and found New Aberfoyle, a subterranean city. But something or someone is set on sabotage, and here Verne treads the line between Scottish folklore and human engagement until all is revealed.

Along the way Nell( the ‘child of the cavern’), is discovered, becoming, having lived her life in the dark, a somewhat naive love interest (a new meaning to carbon dating!) Through her eyes, as she heads above the surface, Verne opens our eyes to the wonders of nature, both on land and astral. But there’s overall a sense that the adventure he wishes to portray is second-hand to his own eyes being opened to the beautiful landscapes experienced on his own adventure. 

It’s obvious why it’s not as well known as Verne’s other works. The premise may be audacious but the actual adventure lacks spirit, the people aren’t interesting, and its plotting, even if well foreshadowed, falls a bit flat. The story just plods on, with digressions to recant tales no doubt told on Verne’s trip or to do for coal what Melville did for cetology. Definitely a miner work.

Andy Hamilton is a well-kent name from British TV and radio, having given us, among other things, shows like Drop the Dead Donkey (1990-1998) and Outnumbered (2007-2016). Longhand (2020) is his second novel and, unusually, it’s actually written in longhand, with almost 350 pages of Hamilton’s readable script, complete with additions and scrubbings out.

It’s a long love letter from Malcolm George Galbraith, a large, cumbersome Scotsman, to Bessie, his partner of twenty years. For reasons that he intends to explain, Malcolm has to leave Bessie with considerable urgency and, in fact, as the novel begins, has already left and, as an opening letter to the publisher from Bessie’s solicitors makes clear about his “unverifiable account”, without a trace and to much concern.

It would be a spoiler to reveal much about Malcolm’s story, especially as the first narrative curveball hits us six pages in, but it’s safe to say that it would be hard to put an age on Malcolm because “so many of those early civilizations kept messing around with their calendars”. 

The Malcolm writing the letter is “someone who never changes…a constant in a changing, turbulent world”, but the life (indeed, the many lives) he writes about give us a more fantastical account of the world, pulling in mythological and historical touchpoints. But, really, it’s a state-of-the-nation novel reflecting on our current times, covering subjects like Brexit, the NHS, mental health, ghettoised opinion, and rampant consumerism.

In spite of contemporary concerns, the book ripples with comedic moments, (“Nearly always, the most rational response is a comic one.), whether that be the collision of the mundane with the fantastic or the set pieces recollected by Malcolm. 

Longhand is one of those books where you can say all human life is here. Love, loss, vengeance, comedy, tragedy, and more. It acknowledges along the way, rational minds collectively “surrender entirely to the thrill of their emotions” but, over the larger course of time, standards overall improve, perhaps with one one exception: our handwriting.

“No other change in life demands so much in return,” writes the unnamed narrator in Berta Dávila’s The Dear Ones (2022, tr: Jacob Rogers, 2023). The change in question is having a child and from the outset it’s clear that she has chosen to have an abortion. There’s scant consideration of any morality at play – the choice is made – as this work of autofiction is less about the act and more a survey of the decision. And it’s one derived from past experience.

The impulse to write about this topic comes from a failed attempt to write a novel about the bonds between a mother and her son, where the son is lost in an accident. However, as the fiction feels off, the facts needing manipulated to make it right, it becomes a different story, a personal tale also about a mother and her own grief (“A new mother is a woman grieving for the woman she has left behind.”) brought on by her son.

Five years before, the narrator thought having a child “would bring me close to the platonic ideal of happiness” and, with her partner at the time, had attended fertility clinics and suffered miscarriages before eventual success. The child would be “someone who would fill me with happiness that could occupy all the empty spaces of my melancholy and boredom” but the reality (“he went from a child to a chore’) had gone unconsidered. 

Now, with the opportunity to be a mother again, it’s the practical issues (“fatigue, a new domestic routine, self-sacrifice, and surrendering my own time and pleasure”) that weigh heavily alongside questions of her own inadequacy or fitness to be a mother, while also engaging with harsher truths on apathy and the loose fit of the role when the bond between both is “neither magnetic or magical”.

In a straight-talking, clear and engaging style Dávila comes at her narrator’s experiences through many lenses, through family, friends, and the others she meets. It’s a book that understands people come and go in a life, whether that be through relationships naturally ending, the loss of mental faculty, or a friend who disappears leaving only rumours and while we don’t always get to say our farewells, it feels that in writing this book it’s a chance to explain a goodbye without the need for hello.

The Dear Ones is a report from the edges of postpartum depression, a survivor song that tells of the difficulties in having one’s life changed by a child. The emotional disconnect, the societal expectations, and how the supposed happiness gives way to an undercurrent of resentment. But its also a defense “against other peoples ideas”, especially as, like the mother and son (“we’re equal beings who don’t seek to impose our will on one another”), there is life to be had if those that matter are embraced and what doesn’t make us happy is rejected.