Our Share of Night

This is Enriquez’s first full-length novel translated into English, following her Booker Prize–shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories. After the suspicious death of his wife, Juan and their son Gaspar are on the run from a cult called the Order. Juan, raised by the Order from childhood, is a medium with fading abilities, and his son is showing a propensity for the same gift, one that the Order will stop at nothing to harness in their quest for immortality. The sense of foreboding throughout feels all too real, as the story lines jump back and forth between Argentina in the 1960s and its political struggles post–military dictatorship. While the writing is original, the story is dense, and the instances of horror are so spread out across the book’s many pages that the mesmerism and mystery of the novel get lost, leaving the plot ill-defined as neither ghost nor love story.