Only a Little While Here - by María Ospina (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize - Winner of Colombia's National Novel Award

This prizewinning novel interweaves four animal odysseys in a gripping, adventurous meditation on migration and displacement in the inextricable human and natural worlds.

In Only a Little While Here, award-winning author María Ospina evokes the gratification to be found through close, humble observation of nature. With characteristic precision and intensity, Ospina trains our attention on the lives of five creatures: a migratory songbird dazzled by city lights, an orphaned porcupine saved by kindness, two dogs grieving the loss of their human companions, and a determined beetle transported to a vast, unimaginable world. The surprising drama of their lives reveals the fragility and power of belonging, and what it means to create--or lose--a home. Along the way, our narrator models the attentiveness needed to mend the rift between humans and nonhuman creatures and celebrates animals' often-overlooked status as witnesses of our shared world.

Alive with eagle-eyed curiosity, Only a Little While Here is ecological fiction at its most soul-stirring.

About the Author

María Ospina was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She's a professor of Latin American culture at Wesleyan University. Her first book of fiction, the short story collection Azares del cuerpo, was published in Colombia, Chile, and Spain, and was translated into Italian and English (Variations on the Body). Her stories have appeared in Colombian anthologies and in literary magazines in the United States. She has also written extensively about contemporary Colombian culture in light of legacies of extractivism, violence, and war, including the book Memory's Conundrum: Literature, Film, and Testimony at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Only a Little While Here, winner of the Colombian National Novel Award (2024) and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Literature (2023) is her first novel.

Heather Cleary, a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, is a translator of poetry and prose from Spanish whose work has been recognized by the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, the National Book Foundation, English PEN, and the International Booker Prize, among others. The author of The Translator's Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, she holds a PhD from Columbia University and is currently writing a novel about translation and betrayal.