Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore

I’ve enjoyed one from Mesa before, Four by Four, and read another, Among the Hedges, which I didn’t get on with so well. In this, she is again in her best form.

Its a character driven book rather than plot driven. Seeking a quieter life, a young and inexperienced female translator, Nat, arrives to the small village of La Escapa, in the north of Spain. The film adaptaion, which I haven’t seen, was released last year, and is set in the Basque country, though there is no indication that the book is.

The young woman takes a rented house, though her landlord comes over immediately as being strange. He presents her with a badly behaved dog as a welcome gesture, which looks like it has been abused. The house creaks and leaks, and needs plenty of repair, but the landlord refuses to help. She befriends Peter, and an older German man, Andreas, who offers to do the repairs. It takes Nat sometime to settle in, the village inhabitants really are a group of oddballs.

The entertainment from the novel is in Mesa’s descriptions of the cast, and Nat’s interactions with them as she tries to make a home for herself. But, as in Mesa’s previous books, she ponders some deeper, moral questions. She finds the fine balance between the levity in the former, and the much deeper issues very well.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5