Creditable UK indie publisher And Other Stories has handled the English-language translations of Yuri Herrera’s bibliography to date, with Lisa Dillman translating each of the Mexican writer’s books from Spanish to English. Season Of The Swamp’s predecessor, Ten Planets, was a collection of short stories roughly in the sci-fi genre but which, as Buzz’s reviewer observed, “focuses more on the existence of new technologies and their effect on the human condition.”

In a sense, this is also what’s going on in Season Of The Swamp, historical fiction with the emphasis on fiction. It’s set in New Orleans circa the 1850s, and so by virtue of geographical proximity is also about Mexico, from where the novel’s protagonist Benito Juárez has arrived, by boat, as a political exile. Later in the decade, he will become the Mexican president, but for now, in the southern United States, he is an undocumented migrant forced to scratch a living.

Herrera’s 170-year-old NOLA feels notably modern in many ways, with its coffee shops (some masquerading as brothels), print shops, heavy industry and street music (especially when Mardi Gras rolls round). He writes in the third person from Juárez’s perspective, interspersing calm passages of recollection with more pointed observations about this exhausting public health crisis of a city. The most significant of these concerns the ongoing open-air slavery trade, which becomes a central plot point in Season…’s second half: this was a dehumanised industry, or technology, of the era, and in these pages, its effect on the human condition is addressed with a sort of horrified wit.