Only a Little While Here Summary: A Novel by María Ospina
Introduction
A stray dog named Kati guards a recycling cart on a Bogotá street until police tanks tear through the block.
A scarlet tanager collides with a Manhattan skyscraper while flying south for the winter.
Only a Little While Here by María Ospina, translated by Heather Cleary, follows these creatures and others across the Americas, tracing how human conflict and environmental destruction shape nonhuman lives.
The novel won Colombia’s National Novel Award and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.
Its six-part structure moves between Bogotá, the Andes, the Darién Gap, and the United States, centering animals as witnesses to a world they did not build.
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TL;DR
Five nonhuman creatures navigate displacement across the Americas.
A stray dog loses her human companion to a police eviction, a migratory songbird survives light pollution and deforestation, a beetle is accidentally transported 100 kilometers, a porcupine is raised on human breast milk, and a shelter dog refuses domestic life.
The novel interweaves their journeys with human stories of migration, deportation, and environmental damage.
It is literary fiction told from animal perspectives, with a lyrical, elegiac tone. No single human protagonist dominates; the animals carry the narrative.
Read the Full & In-Depth Chapter-by-Chapter Summary of Only a Little While Here Book
Who Should Read Only a Little While Here?
This novel suits readers of literary fiction who are interested in environmental narratives and nonhuman perspectives.
The narrative is episodic and multi-threaded, moving across geography and species without a single human protagonist. Readers who prefer plot-driven stories may find the structure unconventional.
The prose is lyrical and sensory, with a contemplative, elegiac tone. The book’s six-part mosaic structure appeals to readers comfortable with interwoven vignettes.
Those interested in Colombian history, migration, and interspecies storytelling will find relevant material.
Only a Little While Here Summary: The Full Story
Spoilers ahead. This section recounts the novel’s main events and ending.
In Bogotá, a stray mutt named Kati lives with Luis, a homeless recycler. They sleep beside a guayacán tree in a park, next to Luis’s recycling cart.
One night, police arrive with tanks and tear gas. They are clearing the area for a “New Arts District.” Luis is arrested and hauled away. Kati guards the cart and searches downtown, sitting outside the Palacio de Justicia as Luis taught her.
Animal control workers capture Kati and load her into a van. Meanwhile, a brown spotted dog named Mona is abandoned, tied to a fence outside a Bogotá café.
A café worker, herself an internal refugee displaced from her rural hometown fourteen years earlier, feeds Mona and brings her to the municipal shelter. Kati and Mona share a kennel and form an intense bond.
The narrative shifts to a male Scarlet Tanager migrating south from Connecticut to the Andes. Flying through Manhattan, he enters a vortex of artificial light from a glass skyscraper. Thousands of birds collide with the glass and fall 110 stories.
The tanager survives. A doorman collects the fallen birds and buries them in a Bronx park with his daughter. An ornithologist later unearths the gravesite to retrieve a geolocator sensor.
The tanager continues south, passing Dulles Airport, a retired colonel’s Virginia home, an abandoned plantation house, and a monument to John C. Calhoun in Charleston where protesters spray-paint slogans. He flies over a migrant child detention facility near the southern border.
He crosses the Gulf of Mexico and reaches the Darién Gap in Panama. An exiled Emberá shaman riding in a research aircraft reflects on his lost ancestral tree in Colombia.
Entering Colombia near Dabeiba, the tanager dodges military helicopters and crop-fumigation planes. A rural family abandons their poisoned land for Medellín. Arriving in Bogotá, the exhausted bird strikes a bank window and falls onto a balcony.
A woman observes the paralyzed bird and researches Zugunruhe, the migratory restlessness described by Ospina. The tanager recovers and flies to his Andean destination, only to find his forest home clear-cut into cattle pasture.
He shelters in a single surviving ancient oak before moving to an adjacent patch of old-growth cloud forest. A female June Bug emerges from rural Colombian soil and is trapped inside a bag of harvested chard.
The bag is driven 100 kilometers to a Bogotá apartment. The beetle crawls out a window into the soil, where a young thrush swallows her. In rural Boyacá, an infant porcupine is orphaned after a dog kills her mother.
Teresa Tibaquirá Ruiz, a community leader, rescues the newborn and nurses her with human breast milk from her daughter. As the porcupine grows quills, Teresa fears legal fines and surrenders the animal to a Bogotá wildlife shelter. Reception staff refuse her a final goodbye.
At the Bogotá shelter, Gloria Inés Rengifo, a retired bank employee, adopts Kati. Kati is taken from the shelter without saying goodbye to Mona, leaving both dogs in grief.
Gloria brings Kati to her rural estate in Boyacá and renames her “Leti.” Kati refuses to eat or sleep inside. She bonds with Gloria’s housekeeper, who is revealed to be Teresa, the same woman who surrendered the porcupine.
Every night, Kati slips under the front gate and trots along mountain paths to sleep on Teresa’s doormat. Teresa accepts Kati’s independence without demanding submission. Armed tomb raiders enter the surrounding forest, an Indigenous Muisca burial site, and detonate explosives.
Kati gallops toward the sound and pursues the fleeing looters on their motorcycles, biting one driver’s leg. The driver kicks Kati into a ditch, bruising her ribs. Wild bees sting her swollen muzzle.
Kati recovers under the care of both women and continues her nightly wanderings.
She asserts her sovereignty over the mountain terrain while harboring a memory of Mona. In the canopy of the same ancient oak forest, the scarlet tanager builds his fat reserves and takes flight into the night, beginning his northbound journey back across the continent.
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Characters In This Book
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Kati (Lady / Leti) | A black stray mutt in Bogotá who lives with Luis, is captured by animal control, adopted by Gloria, and relocated to rural Boyacá. |
| Mona (Reina) | A brown spotted female dog abandoned outside a Bogotá café, rescued by a café worker, and placed in the shelter where she bonds with Kati. |
| The Scarlet Tanager | A migratory songbird making annual transcontinental flights between Connecticut and the Colombian Andes. |
| The June Bug | A female beetle emerging from rural Colombian soil, transported in a bag of chard to Bogotá, and eaten by a thrush. |
| The Porcupine | An orphaned infant quilled mammal whose mother is killed by a dog, raised on human breast milk by Teresa before being surrendered. |
| Luis | A homeless recycler in Bogotá who shares a shelter and recycling cart with Kati before being arrested by police. |
| Gloria Inés Rengifo | A retired bank employee who buys a rural estate in Boyacá and adopts Kati from the Bogotá shelter. |
| Teresa Tibaquirá Ruiz | Gloria’s rural housekeeper and community board president who nursed the orphaned porcupine and becomes Kati’s chosen night refuge. |
| The Café Worker | An internally displaced woman in Bogotá who feeds Mona and brings her to the shelter. |
| The NYC Doorman | A Manhattan skyscraper doorman who collects fallen migratory birds and buries them in a Bronx park. |
| The Ornithologist | A researcher who tracks a cerulean warbler geolocator to the Bronx gravesite. |
| The Retired US Colonel | A Virginia resident with PTSD who photographs migratory birds and interacts with his Guatemalan housekeeper. |
| The Guatemalan Housekeeper | An undocumented migrant in Virginia who crosses borders with her son and is later deported. |
| The Jaibaná | An exiled Emberá shaman in Panama who identifies trees from a research aircraft. |
| The Colombian Woman on the Balcony | A former National Archive worker who finds the dazed tanager and researches Zugunruhe. |
| The Young Girl and Her Mother | Rural Colombians near Dabeiba who wash off crop poison and later move to Medellín. |
| The Shelter Caretaker | A compassionate staff member at the Bogotá Animal Care Unit who looks after Kati and Mona. |
Layers of Meaning
| Theme | How the Book Presents It |
|---|---|
| Displacement and Exile | Kati’s police eviction from Bogotá streets, Mona’s abandonment, the Guatemalan housekeeper’s deportation, the Emberá shaman’s exile, and child migrants in border detention. |
| Interspecies Solidarity | The bond between Kati and Mona in the shelter, Teresa nursing the porcupine with breast milk, and Kati choosing Teresa’s doorstep each night. |
| Environmental Destruction | Skyscraper light pollution killing migrating birds, aerial crop fumigation, deforestation replacing forests with cattle pasture, and grave robbing. |
| Autonomy and Resistance | Kati rejecting domestic ownership, the june bug righting herself, birds crossing political borders, and women protesting racist monuments and child detention. |
| Impermanence | The Nezahualcoyotl epigraph on earthly transience, the constant movement of migratory birds, and the june bug’s energy becoming a thrush’s song. |
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Book Snapshot
- Genre & Subgenre: Literary Fiction / Environmental Fiction / Interspecies Storytelling
- Core Narrative Tropes: Animal focalization, multi-POV mosaic, migration and displacement narrative, human-animal bond
- Tone & Atmosphere: Lyrical, atmospheric, sensory, elegiac, contemplative
- Primary Conflict: Nonhuman creatures surviving migration, displacement, and autonomy against human urban clearance, environmental destruction, and captivity
- Pacing Style: Episodic, panoramic, multi-threaded mosaic
- ISBN: 978-1668097083
- Pages: 224
- Book Structure: 6 main parts, each prefaced by epigraphs in Indigenous languages and world literature
- Author Background: María Ospina was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and teaches Latin American culture at Wesleyan University. Only a Little While Here is her first novel, following the short story collection Variations on the Body.
Quotes from Only a Little While Here
“Do we truly live rooted in earth? Not forever on earth: only a little while here. Even jade crumbles, even gold cracks, even quetzal feathers turn to dust. Not forever on earth: only a little while here.”
“What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals.”
“She knows how to sit on the corner by the Palacio de Justicia like he taught her when she was little and to wait while he disappears down the streets around the cathedral, certain he will honor his ‘be right back.'”
“Zugunruhe From the German Zug, movement or migration, and Unruhe, restlessness or disquiet.”
“Guests of the sky, where there is no shelter, they ignore the nefarious borders invented by humans and scorn their rage at foreigners.”
“In old times, they said that if one of those spikes stays in you too long, the porcupine that stuck you takes over your life. If something bad happens to the porcupine, or if it feels pain, then the person feels it too.”
“Certainly the june bug—winged music, forest crackle, witness to the lives of mud—will bequeath some of her vitality to the sharp song of the bird from a city so foreign to her.”
