Only a Little While Here

Colombian writer Ospina (Variations on the Body, a story collection) dismantles the illusion of man-made borders in her beautiful debut novel, which tracks the migrations of five animals. It begins with a dog named Kati, who’s left on the streets of Bogotá when her unhoused owner is arrested. She’s taken to a shelter, where she meets another dog, Mona, abandoned by her owner. Elsewhere, a scarlet tanager bird survives a near-fatal impact with a Manhattan skyscraper and flies south to Colombia, over migrant children corralled in a detention center in Florida, only to find his home in the mountains clear-cut and poisoned by pesticides. In other narrative threads, a newborn beetle is whisked from the countryside into a Bogotá apartment where she becomes lost amid the foreign steel and cement, and a woman gives up her pet porcupine. Later, Ospina circles back to Kati, who’s uprooted once again, this time to the countryside, where she eventually claims a new independence. Animated by a sense of wonder about animals’ inner lives in a landscape increasingly altered by humans, Ospina’s narrative hints at the radical possibilities of a future shaped by purposeful communion with nature. This is revelatory. (Mar.)