Shortlist for the International Booker Prize, 2024

Winner of the IILA Award for best Latin American novel published in Italy in the 2021/2022 biennium, 2023 

The novel tells the story of two friends, Enero and El Negro, who take Tilo, the teenage son of Eusebio —their recently deceased friend— fishing to the Paraná River. While they drink and cook and talk and dance, they try to overcome the ghosts of their past and those of the present— their mood altered by wine and torpor.

This intimate, peculiar moment connecting the lives of these three men also links them to the lives of the local inhabitants of this nature universe, surrounded by water and ruled by its own laws.

There are losses, premature deaths… But there is also the stubborn vitality of nature: a bush covered with ancient trees, animals, birds; the river bearing life in its entrails, the people born and raised in this landscape which they protect with nails and teeth against intruders.

Nature, gestures, the elements, soaks the psychology of the story, whose intensity and contrasts evoke the technique of xylography, used in this case with dazzling mastery. Ignacio Echevarría

I always read Selva Almada with devotion, but in order to finish No es un río I had to stand up in the middle of my living room and read it aloud. How much wellness comes from good literature. Samanta Schweblin

The most admirable aspect of No es un río is the way the author builds a space for meanings that travel between fantasy and realism. Marta Sanz

With incisive, lacerating writing that softens as the story progresses, Almada carries the reader to a place where pain, betrayal and fear are part of everyday life in the provinces. Le Monde

Almada’s prose is sparse, but the details count. Her ear for dialogue and especially gossip is pitch perfect. Her eye for detail is hawkish. LA Review of Books

Almada burns off all the dross and gives us pure revelation, cryptic and true. Paul Harding

The language reaches the condensation of poetry. The sentences are extremely short; the descriptions, adjusted; the images, precise. Verónica Voix, Diario La Nación

Selva Almada, like Clare Keegan, describes the floating silence and in this last novel she does so with the silence left by the death of those men, in that mountain, in that river. Radar Libros / Página 12

In her stories the earth speaks (…), nature makes itself being heard. Diario La Nación

She portrays with the accuracy of a sniper. Not only people with their vertigo, but also the rivers and the night. Mean, precise, rough and even so, voluptuous. Lara Moreno

Selva Almada provides No es un río with an enormous strength thanks to a writing where local customs and manners become poetry. Elvira Navarro

Almada confirms her mastery in the creation of atmospheres of growing darkness, where hazard opens way to tragedy. El cultural

(…) with a cadence in the phrasing that allows the narrative to flow rhythmically, vibrantly, musically, with a poetic sobriety that is a trademark of the house and here shines in all its splendor. Cristina Ros, The Objective

Other books by the same author

Children’s Literature