Published in 2023 (first published 2022)
169 pages
Margarita García Robayo was born in 1980 in Cartagena, Colombia, and now lives in Buenos Aires where she teaches creative writing and works as a journalist and scriptwriter. She is the author of several novels, including Hasta que pase un huracán (Waiting for a Hurricane) and Educación Sexual (Sexual Education, both included in Fish Soup), Holiday Heart, and Lo que no aprendí (The Things I have Not Learnt). She is also the author of a book of autobiographical essays Primera Persona (First Person) and several collections of short stories, including Worse Things, which obtained the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014 (also included in Fish Soup). The Delivery is her third book to appear in English after the very successful Fish Soup (selected by the TLS as one of the best fiction titles of 2018) and Holiday Heart (Winner of the English PEN Award).
What is this book about?
A novel of motherhood, memory, and possibility just this side of the uncanny.
An enormous package arrives that can’t be opened, Agatha the cat appears and disappears, half-finished buildings punctuate the horizon―semi-ordinary happenings that take on an otherworldly cast if you look at them sideways. And nothing is stranger, in this high rise apartment far from home, than the tenuous bonds of family that hold us together, or don’t. The narrator works, zooms with her sister, makes plans for the future (a writing residency, a child), and tentatively probes her past, while subtle fissures open up around her, changing her life forever. As she says about her childhood home, “Sometimes I get curious…but I don’t ask, because the answer could come with information I’d rather not know.” By turns tender and biting, this is Robayo’s finest work yet.
