The Delivery was next up to read from my 2023 Charco Press bundle and was published on 24 October. This year’s books have been so great, I couldn’t wait to get to this one. I haven’t read her previous translated book Fish Soup, but I had heard good things about it too.

Charco Press and Latin American Fiction On a Roll

One of the earlier Charco novellas I read this year, The Remains (see my review) by Mexican author Margo Glantz (translated by Ellen Jones) just made the longlist of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023. In the same week Two Sherpas (see my review) by Sebastian Martinez Daniell translated by Jennifer Croft was longlisted for the 2024 ALA Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Ana Paula Maia’s Of Cattle And Men, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry made the 2023 Cercador Prize Finalists ( a bookseller-led prize for literature in translation).

Warning: Don’t Ignore Your Packages – The Review

A young, unapologetically self-absorbed woman lives alone, away from her family. Though loathe to form attachments, she is hyper observant of all that goes on around her; the neighbour into whose apartment she sees, the doorman sweeping below, the mother with her young son, the unreliable babysitter.

A large package arrives from her sister who told her via one of their infrequent video-calls, that she was leaving with her family on a cruise. The sisters have a complicated relationship, one she ponders.

When she notices my silence she goes quiet and sighs. I guess she, too, gets fed up with the weight of incomprehension. I guess that on top of seeming like a sister who is detached, dejected and discourteous, I also come off as an arrogant person. Kinship isn’t enough for her, either, of course it isn’t. In cases like ours, getting along isn’t a question of magic or chemistry or affinity, but of tenacity, toughness and torturous toiling.

The package, the size of a large crate stays in the hallway for two days until neighbours complain, knock on the door and push it into her seventh floor apartment. She continues to ignore it.

It’s noon; my sister must be aboard her cruise ship by now. I can just see her gazing excitedly at the array of interactive screens showing maps of the ship marked with little flags: ‘…over twenty stations of international food.’
I wonder: When my sister isn’t there, who takes care of my mother?

Working from home as a freelance copy writer, she meets her boss once a week. Currently working on a piece about a cow, while procrastinating over completing a grant for a writer’s residency in Holland. Here she questions whether her choice to be a writer is another act of avoidance.

And although writing is something I have done every day for years now, I again get the feeling that this thing I call ‘my job’ is nothing but another avoidance strategy. Compared to all other professions, writing is like the effort a tick makes to feed and survive among predators. I climb onto a branch, wait a long time until the herd passes, calculate the least risky distance to drop onto a fluffy mass and drink a minuscule ration of blood, which will allow me to maintain this limited but sufficient life.

Her attempts to avoid human contact threaten to overwhelm her, as increasingly she is drawn in to life around her and made to be present.

I felt I had the right to not be a trustworthy person. It was good to make that clear, even if it worked against my professional future; from now on you should be aware that assigning me a job includes the possibility that I’ll quit halfway through. That was more or less how I put it. It was the closest I would come in this business to an outburst of dignity.

The novel follows a week or so in her life and the people (and a cat) with whom she interacts, both willingly and unwillingly. Encounters that awaken memories, that cause her to explore her own responses and thoughts on them all, she avoids closeness but each situation contributes to the growing relationships between them all.

Her efforts to keep a distance stall, fail and slowly make her see her own role in running from herself, the inclination to self-sabotage.

Sometimes I feel like two people live inside me, and one of those people (the good one) keeps the other in check, but sometimes she gets tired and lowers her guard and then the other (evil) one stealthily emerges, with a mad desire to wound just for the sake of it.

It’s both introspective and funny, as her avoidance and inattention to things leads to consequences that surprise her and because we see everything from her perspective, we too have a somewhat clouded view of reality.

Her philosophical considerations and snippets of conversation give pause for thought. It’s entertaining in a surreal yet banal way, knowing that life’s reality is likely to burst the bubble she lives in eventually, yet it doesn’t stop her from continuing to ponder and escape from it.

How quickly the shell of a routine is shattered.
Any routine, however solid it may be, is obliterated by the unexpected.

Margarita García Robayo, Author

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, forthcoming with Charco Press) 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).

Her books have been published widely and praised in Latin America and Spain and have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Hebrew, French, Danish and Turkish. 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).