After all my travels, all those years lost and won and lost again; after testing a thousand times the raw stock of my being, which never seemed to cook; when at last I had found a man and I had loved him, they called me up so I could see how the story ended: the living room covered in blood from wall to wall, the ransacked house, the abandoned axe. What was I supposed to say?

Given that the unnamed narrator–protagonist of Mariana Dimópulos’s All My Goodbyes (Cada despedida) has difficulty putting together and understanding her own fractured, nomadic life, it is perhaps not surprising that we readers have to call on all of our faculties to reconstruct her narrative – but it is well worth the effort. It is often a challenge even to know where we are in time because of the constant shifts from present to past, but this fragmentation contributes to a sense of timelessness – or to the unimportance of time – in this novella where the past is remembered from the present and where place matters more than time. This, too, calls for a focused reader alert to every verbal nuance and tense shift, and willing to assemble the narrative jigsaw. Spare a thought for the translator, Alice Whitmore, whose task it was to convert this Spanish puzzle into an equally enthralling English one – and who does so magnificently.