That's All I Know

A propulsive, bewitching novel about home and family, the ache of unrealised dreams and the quiet tragedy of unrequited love.

Nineteen-year-old Lea is from a village that is out of time, out of jobs and out of hope. She and her friends, however, are vivid and electric with life. They yearn, they dance, they fuck, they fight. And around them, a world that isn’t quite our own vibrates with strangeness and threat.

Now Lea is here, sitting on a bench, telling a silent stranger her life story. Because yesterday, change was finally unavoidable.

A novel of rural entrapment and coming of age, Elisa Levi’s That’s All I Know bears the traces of Beckett and Lorca, rings with the echo of folktales and has a fierce, unapologetic vitality at its heart. Startlingly odd and deeply moving, it is the work of a profound and singular talent.

‘A novel that evokes the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez.’ Última Hora

‘A text that gallops, that overflows, that has something of a river.’ El ojo crítico

‘A book about the inability to leave the place where you were born . . . It reminded me of Miguel Delibes’ The Way and Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding . . . it is very beautiful.’ Miqui Otero

Elisa Levi is a playwright, poet and writer. She studied at RADA and now divides her time between being the director of a MFA in Editing and Publishing, and writing residencies all over the world. Yo no sé de otras cosas (That’s All I Know) is her debut in the English language.

Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning literary translator, working mainly in the areas of Latin American fiction, essays, poetry and hybrid texts. She has translated works by such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Jazmina Barrera, Daniel Saldaña París and Elvira Navarro. In 2024, she was granted a Sundial Literary Translation Award for Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s The Company and in 2025 her translation of Clyo Mendoza’s Fury was a finalist for the Premio Valle Inclán.