Safe Return Doubtful

Translated from the Spanish by Rahul Berry – Published 2026

This is a novel about about the death of a loved one, the grief that follows, the horrors of war, and slavery in the early 1800s, and yet, it is a huge amount of fun.

The narrator, a man born in a Viennese brothel, Redo Hauptshammer, is looking back at his life and writing about a time when he first moved to live in the town of Szonden on the banks of the river Oder. He buys an acre of land on which he intends to plat crops. He is constantly revising his text, and that has been translated; there are footnotes from the translator which suggest it has been written after Redo’s death.

Redo has recently lost his wife, in a random, almost darkly humorous, accident. In a market in Mainz she gets hit by a bullet from the crossfire of a skirmish. Put simply, the novel is about Redo trying to bury his wife, but all sorts of things get in the way and stop him from doing so. At his first attempt, as he digs his spade hits the frozen body of what turns out to be a soldier, then a second, then a fourth, then it seems a small army of at least thirty two – all frozen, even on a warm day. Even when they are exposed to the warmth of the day and sunlight they remain frozen.

There is a superb cast of local villagers also. Redo consults his historian friend Jakob Moltke, Mayor Altmeyer, his neighbor Hans, and various other administrators to see what he’s discovered, and they are also dumbfounded. Fold in a local witch, a giant, and the amorous daughter of the local baron, and the entertainment value is considerable.

Mora’s writing is tremendous. He won the Málaga prize for it. He is the sort of author who toys with his reader, the text full of concealed hints and cunning double-meanings. Combine this with the translation of Rahul Berry, who won the PEN Translates Award for the novel, and this really is a novel to savour.

It will be one of my novel’s of the year.

Here is a link to a conversation between Mora and Berry, his translator.

My GoodReads score 5 / 5