Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Spanish (Argentina) by Will Morningstar

Published September 2025

Lina Ramos and her husband, Relicario, live in the high, arid lands above the pampas in Argentina. The exact location isn’t revealed, but from my own travels (and imagination) I picture somewhere above Salta.

Life is a struggle, particularly after a long period of drought. For fourteen years, Lina begged her husband to abandon their small house, but Relicario sees their duty as to stay, and look after their dead ancestors in the graveyard. Counseled by the village healer, Lina departs on her own, taking a few supplies and walking down slopes of “jagged rocks” with anxious determination in search of a stream she has heard of. Meanwhile, Relicario is stunned by his wife’s sudden absence and soon decides to follow her, accompanied by a donkey named Jumento and the bones of his mother and father which he has dug up, beginning a long and arduous journey, guessing Lina’s course at every junction.

This is an emotional and visceral fable of family, and the haunting cycles of death and displacment, propelled by a quest of migration described in evocative prose by a promising young writer’s first translated novel.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5