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I love that feeling when you are thinking about a place, a conversation or an experience you know well, but you’re looking for something new… If you go back and pay more attention, there are so many more things to be discovered.” It took me almost a year to realise I would need a hundred more pages than the ten I was accustomed to writing. “It was so strange, so frustrating, because I knew each of the characters, I knew the story almost completely, I knew about agrochemicals, the migrations and superstitions, everything – and it just didn’t work.

“At the beginning it was a short story, and I wrote it twelve times,” she recalls. Her passion for environmental concerns is evident, but Fever Dream was constructed from many diverse elements, and it took Scwheblin longer than she expected to align them. This is very dangerous, because we are losing hundreds of species of seeds, we are losing food.” Seeds that are natural, that a family may have been working with for thousands of years, they say have not been tested so they can’t be used. “If you’re a small farmer and you want to work with your own seeds, you can’t,” Schweblin adds, “because Monsanto and other companies have registered the genetic codes of their seeds, and maintain that only these tested seeds are legal. It’s no surprise all this is run by American-owned agrochemical companies like Monsanto, who modus operandi is to supply farmers with GM seeds that will only grow in certain chemical compounds – which they also supply. In Europe you can see where the landscapes end, but in Argentina – and in America – if you stand in the middle of these fields, it’s like being in the middle of the ocean.” “Maybe,” she shrugs, “but only hundreds of years in the future because most of the farming is soya, which takes all the nutrients from the soil and gives nothing back. I ask Schweblin if she has any hopes for a similar recovery in the Argentinian countryside where intensive agriculture has taken hold. I read Fever Dream in a single sitting on a train ride to Cornwall, once an extensively industrial area dominated by metal mines, quarries and their effluents, but now one of England’s most celebrated areas of natural beauty.

It’s a timeless fable of migrating souls and supernatural menace, set against the present-day backdrop of environmental breakdown and poisonous crop-spraying in Argentina’s sprawling soya fields. A disorientating and utterly gripping psychological thriller and an unsettling exploration of family ties, panic and dread, it is told in spare dialogue between a woman called Amanda who lies dying in a dimly lit hospital ward far from home, and a boy called David at her side who is uncannily wise and urgently impatient. Samanta Schweblin is an acclaimed Argentinian short-story writer whose compact debut novel Fever Dream is shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

“ Explosive… a skin-prickling masterclass in dread and suspense.” The Economist