The latest addition to my website is Fernando Contreras Castro‘s Única mirando al mar (Única Looking at the Sea). It tells the story of a group of scavengers (they are called divers in this book) who live in a shanty town on the main San José, Costa Rica, rubbish dump. They earn their living from what they can find in the dump, They are there because of bad luck, such as job loss or being abandoned, in the case of a child. We follow Única Oconitrillo, a former teacher’s aide, as she gradually becomes the mother figure of the other divers and finds, among other things, a son and a husband on the dump. Contreras Castro very much treats them all sympathetically but the locals, the police and the government do not. The locals want the dump moved and the divers are caught in the middle, as the government lies to all parties.