Paraísos is the first-person telling of the story of a young woman who on being widowed and evicted from the house at Opendoor, decides to move to the capital with her little son Simón.

In the city she finds work at the zoo’s reptile house and squats at El Buti, run by drug dealers, drag queens and Tosca, a unique character.

The inexpressive young woman has a passive relationship with the world, which is disrupted by her encounters with the irreverent Eloísa, a more enigmatic than correct character with whom she shares a past and with whom she has an ambiguous relationship.

The protagonist enters into hallucinatory states with alcohol and marijuana impelled by the irrepressible personality of her friend Eloísa, who urges her to commit all sorts of excesses.

Paraísos moves from melancholy to paroxysm while deploying a whole bestiary of lonely, unfortunate characters.

Passion and Passivity: Havilio has found just the right tone and dampened register for recounting the extreme. Paraísos transpires in an irresistible, ghostly normality. Beatriz Sarlo

It would not be neither absurd nor obvious to state that in the area of contemporary Argentine literature Paraísos is principally a “credible, almost perfect novel”. Revista Tónica

Paraísos is as strong as Opendoor. Diario El País, Uruguay

You cannot write well without a lot of effort. Paraísos makes this evident. Luis Alonso Diario de Ferrol

Havilio distances himself from the universe of contemporary Argentinian literature because he narrates from a unique and personal way. Marcela Gamberini,  Tiempo Argentino

Published by: Argentina Editorial Mondarori/Spain Editorial Caballo de Troya  /English And Other Stories Publishing/

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