When his fireworks factory job ends explosively and his wife returns to work, Jose is surprised to realise he has a talent for keeping house: childcare, tidying, cleaning, cooking, gardening, he excels at it all. On Thursdays, he hangs out and drinks good wine with his jazz-loving neighbour. But when Jose's new talents take a sudden and gruesome turn, life, death, resurrection, and domesticity unexpectedly converge. In one single, hypnotic paragraph, Petite Fleur harnesses the unpredictability of Aira and the mysticism of Tolstoy in a discordant riff on suburban life.

In contemporary Argentine literature, Paradises is an almost perfect novel.--Tonica Albert Camus's The Outsider reimagined with a female lead in in twenty-first-century Buenos Aires. Recently widowed, a young woman leaves the countryside for Buenos Aires with her four-year-old son where she seeks to build a new life for herself. She finds work in the zoo and moves into the human zoo of a squatted tower block at the invitation of one of its residents, to whom she acts as nurse, giving morphine injections. Iosi Havilio's captivating voice has brought him cult status in Argentina.