Bait

It was an afternoon at the beginning of that summer . . .

Marga is about to turn thirteen. Whiling away muggy afternoons in the small fisherman’s town of Paso Chico, she watches her favourite soap on TV and waits for something, anything, to happen.

Almost like an apparition, Recio arrives: disrupting the silence of siesta and revealing the strange, twisted dynamics of the town’s inhabitants.

As a cargo ship waits on the viscous river of this hot, humid town, a sea of mud and secrets is unleashed, love and violence colliding as generational traumas and age-old superstitions come to the fore. Haunting and wry, Eugenia Ladra’s debut is an elemental fever dream of burning desire and coming of age.

Translated by Miriam Tobin