The Delivery by Margarita García Robayo, translated by Megan McDowell (Charco, £11.99)
A young Colombian woman living in Argentina is estranged from her family but still in touch with her sister, who sends regular packages. One day a huge crate arrives that occupies the whole living room: it contains her mother. “I don’t want to bother you,” she says. “Did you eat breakfast?” As our narrator adjusts to becoming a daughter again (“Aside from heavy food and popular tourist information, what else did she bring?”), she also has to work for an ad agency, writing an “appealing story about a cow who is happy … so her meat will be optimal”. And she must deal with disputes between neighbours, who “tore down walls and more walls until they created not space, but emptiness”. This multi-centred novel (family, work, home) contains everything: death, life and all the stuff in between.
