Fever Dream

Amanda lies in a rural hospital bed in the Argentine countryside, and a boy named David sits beside her asking questions. He is not her son, and she does not know how much time she has left. Through their exchange she works backward through the days that brought her there, on holiday with her young daughter, Nina.

Amanda keeps a private measure she calls the rescue distance, the space she could cross to reach Nina before something goes wrong. Her neighbor Carla, David's mother, becomes her closest confidante on the trip. Slowly, she makes clear that something happened to her own son, something Amanda needs to understand.

David drank from a stream fouled by pesticide runoff and nearly died. A local healer split his soul between two bodies to save him, and the boy who came back is not entirely himself. Carla's husband Omar, a former racehorse breeder, has already lost animals to the same poisoned water.

The whole novel runs as one unbroken, chapterless conversation. David presses Amanda toward the part that matters while her memory circles and doubles back. It reads like its own fever, closer to a long held breath than a plotted mystery, grounded in a real crisis in Argentine farm country.

Translated from the Spanish Distancia de rescate, the novel was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella the same year.