Only a Little While Here A Novel

by Ospina, María; Cleary, Heather

• ISBN13: 9781668097083
• ISBN10: 1668097087
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2026-03-31
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

This prizewinning novel weaves together four animal odysseys in a poignant meditation on migration, displacement, and the inextricable human and natural worlds.

In Only a Little While Here, award-winning author María Ospina evokes a sensation birders know well—the gratification to be had through close, humble observation of nature. With characteristic grace and curiosity, Ospina trains our attention on the lives of four creatures: a south-bound songbird dazzled by city lights, an orphaned porcupine saved by human kindness, a loyal dog grieving the abduction of her human companion, and a determined beetle transported to a vast, unimaginable world. The surprising drama of their lives reveals the fragility and resilience of belonging, and what it means to create—or lose—a home.

Each animal’s journey challenges us to confront the beauty and brutality of the world we shape around our non-human fellows. Along the way, the narrator models the intense interest needed to mend the rift between humans and animals, and celebrates their often-overlooked status as witnesses of our shared world.

Tender, meditative, and soul-stirring, Only a Little While Here is ecological fiction at its most inventive and heartfelt.

Author Biography

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 is based in New York and Mexico City. She is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction and has written about translation for publications such as LitHub, Two Lines, and Poets & Writers. Her other translations include María Ospina’s short story collection Variations on the Body, Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda (nominee, International Booker Prize), Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre (winner, Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize), Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias, and Comemadre by Roque Larraquy (both nominated for the National Book Award in Translation), as well as a selected works of Oliverio Girondo titled Poems to Read on a Streetcar. Cleary holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University and previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College.