“Plunging into literature and writing is the only possible escape this sensitive debut novel offers the narrator.” Le Monde des Livres

“The author grasps the difficulty of being with painful subtlety and insight.” La Vie

A sensitive chronicle of a double exile, both national and personal. The portrait of a woman who is uneasy at any latitude, and who seeks asylum in literature.

Translated from Spanish by Alexandra Carrasco Rahal.

Like more than two million of her fellow Venezuelans, in 2018, a young woman flees her ruined country and emigrates with her husband and their young daughter to the outskirts of Bogota. With neither money nor a job, she must face both destitution and xenophobia – an incomprehensible world for a fragile person whose status as a migrant only amplifies her inner unease, here, there, or elsewhere.

Identifying with K. from The Castle, finding no comfort outside of books, she can transcend her solitude only by writing letters to Kafka. They describe her lucid, self-deprecatory view of her flaws, her inability to cope with her own madness, and that of her country, or this “absolute exile,” as Guillermo Rosales put it.

With her simple and limpid writing, her singular and stunningly sincere voice, Vaitiere Rojas Manrique captures the uncertainties of a life that can only be conjugated in the present. And establishes herself as a sister in solitude of the great Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik.