Harare Review of Books

164 pp. September 9, 2025, World Editions. Fiction.

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All That Dies in April is the latest book of which I have thought at the end, “Perfect, just perfect.”

Lina’s left her husband—not because she doesn’t love him anymore, but she’s sick to death of living in the quebrada* where “[sometimes] a couple of clouds appear and we stare at them like they might bring us some water but the quebrada rejects them and they go somewhere else to rain.” Relicario, on the other hand, refuses to leave because he, unreasonably in Lina’s opinion, won’t abandon his dead. (Or maybe, I imagine, he thinks the son—their only child—who left them fifteen years previously might come back.) So Lina asks the local healer for directions to the sea, and leaves him.

It’s a hallucinatory journey, not least because Lina is not entirely prepared and didn’t carry enough food; but where there are other people, there’s help, and she arrives at a place where a kindly woman advises her to work for a while, regain her strength, prepare better before proceeding. This suggestion takes Lina down to the lush plains where she finds work on a ranch run by a complicated man and his sons, a place where there are wild thunderstorms—the thing Lina longed for without ever imagining that it could come with its own problems.

And so one question the novel raises is whether Lina was better off not leaving the quebrada at all; and yet, it’s clear that she and Relicario could no longer survive there. It’s the profound difficulty of having no choice at all when you’re poor; this is a world where misfortune dogs your steps as you seek a better life, and where fortunes turn on a lightning strike.

I enjoyed, too, the echo and mystery of the healing women, Octavia and Iris. It’s almost as if they’re one character in two places; certainly they seem to draw their knowledge and wisdom from the same ancient source. There are other vividly depicted characters, too; and, along with Lina and Relicario, a third important narrator fills in the gaps for readers.

All that Dies in April is polyphonic and poetic, yet it remains sharp, tightly woven, and precise. Travacio condenses (with her translators) this story of a family’s devotion to each other and of devastation into a short, yet intensely potent read. Very highly recommended; this is a story I loved and will read again.

Many thanks to World Editions for a DRC.

*a mountain stream or ravine in South America.

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