EACH of the eight short stories in The Accidentals (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99), by Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettle and translated by Rosalind Harvey, is a perfectly constructed tale of extraordinary force and luminous intelligence, in which family relationships and the strange in everyday life coexist.

An uncle, having drifted away from his family and passing away in a hospital, unexpectedly receives a visit from his niece; a wildfire ignited by an ordinary family on a short break reveals underlying tensions; a surreal brothel marked by a pink door where time shifts abruptly; and a suburban garden featuring a struggling monkey puzzle tree that troubles a family, are some of the tales found in this captivating collection.

Among my favourite stories in this book is the one that gives the book its title. This precise narrative weaves the story of migrant children from Mexico, their dreams, aspirations and anguish, shedding light on diasporic experiences at a time when many Latin American countries suffered bloody dictatorships.

“Childhood does not end in one fell swoop, as we wished it would when we were children. It lingers, crouching silently in our adult, then wizened bodies, until one day, many years later, when we think that the heavy burden of bitterness and despair we’ve been shouldering has turned us irredeemably into adults.” So begins the story.

The Accidentals confirms Nettel as one of Latin America’s most accomplished contemporary writers, a voice of unique lucidity and startling beauty. 

Uruguayan photographer, bookseller, comics scriptwriter, humorist, crossword author, brain games creator and novelist Mario Levrero’s work is difficult to categorise. His book of short stories, The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (And Other Stories, £14.99), translated by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter, includes stories written in the 1960s that now appear for the first time in English. 

Initially published in 1970 and disappeared from the bookshops for almost 25 years, the book reveals an unusual mind where stories are shaped like a Piranesian world with labyrinthine spaces and kaleidoscopic effects. One such story is The Basement, set in a big house inhabited by a boy obsessed with its secret spaces.

“This house had a great many rooms and, although he walked round them all (or perhaps he only thought he had), the boy didn’t know it in full; his memory wasn’t big enough to remember everything.”

McDermott and Schluter have captured Levrero’s essence, his insatiable imagination and curiosity, and the uncanny in the quotidian, bringing to life a book that expands the possibilities of the short-story form.

Catalina Vargas Tovar grew up in Bogota in the 1970s and ’80s, and from her window, she could see the Eastern mountain range as a constant presence. Lemonade: A Paranormal Investigation (Ugly Duckling Presse, £11) has at its core those majestic Andean mountains, an ancestral and natural landscape traversing Latin America. 

“the mountain/ keeps watch observes/ attunes/ separates this plateau/ from the world/ absorbs water/ in excess/ turns it into language/ drips.” 

Meticulously translated from the Spanish by Juliana Borrero, who also wrote an illuminating foreword called Translating The Paranormal, this one-poem collection is a meditation on land and ecology, as well as the geology, history and the “paranormal activities” of a range that is so intrinsic to Latin America mythologies. 

 “a floating temple/ is the mountain/ teeth of the universe/ is the mountain/ a night owl song/ is the mountain/ weightless veil and elevation/ is the mountain/ now she closes/ like an eyelid.” 

A superb pamphlet by a promising new talent in Colombian letters.