Fleeing from her mistakes, Nat rents a house in the small village of La Escapa to start work on her first literary translation…

I enjoyed this one, which kept me on my toes and turns the idea of idyllic small village life firmly on its head. The story took two unexpected, very dramatic turns and I saw neither of them coming.

Mesa perfectly captures the suffocation of tiny village life, the prying eyes, the way everyone somehow knows each other’s business, the judgements and bulldozing through boundaries. The dismissive treatment of a single woman, community dynamics, neighbourly relations - it’s all there and all enhanced by the fishbowl effect of a small community. And it also all (understandably) feeds into Nat’s increasingly unhinged spiralling, which I almost wanted to read through my fingers.

A claustrophobic, spiralling story of trying to make a life in an isolated community as an outsider and toxic relationships.