From Diaz’s second collection, This Is How You Lose Her – unsurprisingly, men in foundering or vanishing relationships feature heavily – ‘Invierno’ is a child’s-eye story. It recounts the arrival of the collection’s central character, Yunior, in the United States from the Dominican Republic. Yunior’s father has been living alone in America for the past five years, and the meat of the story is the family’s attempts to reconnect with one another. But the most affecting image is of Yunior and his older brother, Rafa, sequestered in their claustrophobic apartment, their father too protective to allow them outside to explore their new home.
(This Is How You Lose Her, 2012, published by Faber)
