This month, we’re reading two unnerving tales that traverse South America and Western Europe.
Galápagos: A Novel
Fátima Vélez, trans. Hannah Kauders (Astra House, 208 pp., $22, December 2025)
Galápagos makes no secret that it’s a novel about decay. On the first page, Lorenzo, the narrator, feels his pinky nail coming loose “like a baby tooth.” Soon, all his nails have fallen off, and both of his hands are wrapped in pus-soaked bandages that he tries to ignore, like a bad dream. He has traveled from Colombia to Paris in a desperate attempt to recover his old life, and former lovers, but ends up being thwarted by the grotesque reality of his ailing body.
It soon becomes clear that Lorenzo, along with his friends and lovers, has caught a deadly illness. To escape reality, this cast of bohemians—from sculptors to painters to heirs, all of whom seem to float through life—embarks on a feverish voyage around the Galápagos, where they sail in an oneiric space between life and death, clothed in the skins of sacrificed loved ones.
New York-based Colombian author Fátima Vélez’s take on the plague novel is ambitious and alarming (and certainly not for the squeamish).
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