Alice Whitmore

A new mother holds her month-old son for the first time, but her body betrays her with an absence of feeling. Taking place over the course of an evening, and a lifetime, Imminence shifts seamlessly between the present and the past. Disoriented, she wanders with her partner around their plant-filled Buenos Aires apartment. Little by little, her world begins to unravel.

All My Goodbyes is a novel told in overlapping vignettes, which follow the travels of a young Argentinian woman across Europe (Málaga, Madrid, Heidelberg, Berlin) and back to Argentina (Buenos Aires, Patagonia) as she flees from situation to situation, job to job, and relationship to relationship. Within the complexity of the narrator’s situation, a backstory emerges about a brutal murder in Patagonia which she may or may not be implicated in, but whether this is the cause of her flight is never entirely clear – she is driven as much by psychological concerns, her relationship with her father, uncertainty about her identity and purpose in life. The novella is, as the title suggests, a catalogue of goodbyes, the result of a decade-long cycle of self-inflicted alienation which the narrator, despite herself, seems fated to perpetuate. In its structure it recalls the rich Argentinian tradition of Cortazar and Borges; its language is by turns stark and elaborate, brutal in its economy and yet poetic in its imagery.

Set in modern-day Mexico City, See You at Breakfast? is the story of four characters, leading lives of quiet desperation, who are thrown together by a despicably violent act. Witty, dark and moving, See You at Breakfast? offers a refreshingly frank take on gender politics, the nature of attraction and the burden of everyday life.