This book is not going to be for everyone, but it was for me.
Really enjoyed te writing style, the stream of consciousness with no ending or pauses. It makes the book go faster in my opinion, and it's already a short book. I also really loved some of the dialogues between characters an some of the internal monologue from the narrator. There's some grossnes, some vulgarity, some simply human things in this book that I loved.

This was a great debut novel from Fátima Vélez, it had that element of realistic and I cared about what was happening with the characters. I thought the characters were realistic and I cared about what was happening with the characters, it does a great job in showing the illness and how it affects people. I look forward to reading more from Fátima Vélez as this was really well done.

Before you think of picking this book up I just want you to know that this isn't a story you “enjoy” especially based on that whimsical cover– it’s more like a fever dream you get dragged into and can’t shake off. It’s very VERY grotesque, poetic, confusing, and sometimes straight-up disgusting, but also beautiful in this haunting way.

Reading it felt like watching people fall apart and still somehow keep living like watching films, writing letters, drinking too much, making art, even as their bodies are literally decomposing. It’s gross, but it’s also tender. I kept swinging between feeling repulsed and completely mesmerized. There’s not really a neat plot or comforting resolution here. Instead the author throws you into this world where desire and decay, love and illness, creativity and destruction all blur together. It feels messy and extreme, but that’s what makes it so powerful. It's art.

Honestly, this isn’t an easy read. It made me uncomfortable, it pushed me away, and then it pulled me right back in. But by the end I felt like I’d gone somewhere I couldn’t have reached with any other book; a place where death and beauty exist side by side. And that is the beauty of LITERATURE.

It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you’re willing to sit with discomfort and let a book crawl under your skin, pick this up because it was unforgettable.

4.5 ⭐️ Thank you Astra Publishing House for my advance reading copy!

I think if I was to describe this book in one word, it would be 'liminal'. Throughout the entire story, everything is changing - despite what the characters desire, if they desire anything. It's generally a change for the worse, but clinging to a status quo they know only makes the worsening even worse.

This is a very messy, queer story. It is messy in both a very physical way, as the characters decay but also in a moral way - there are no heroes here. The characters are very queer, in a way that is more complicated than any one label can really ascribe to them. They cling to each other, despite everything. The book is not 'satisfying' but I don't think it is trying to be, because life is rarely 'satisfying' either.

This is NOT a book for the faint of heart, due to the quite gruesome descriptions of bodies falling apart as well as rather blasé mentions of rape and murder.

I really liked the first half of the story, which acts as a lead up to the second. This is a story that actually starts in a grounded way but leans more and more fantastical as the disease (which we know is HIV/AIDS despite not being named) progresses.

However, I didn't really like the lack of speech marks for dialogue as I sometimes got confused as to what was meant to be dialogue and what was meant to be narration/description. I do understand this is meant to help with the liminal or 'blurry' feeling of the book but it personally made me need to re-read several sections.

I also think the book is a bit... racist. There is one Indigenous character who is othered by the others (who are white or I think light skinned) and while this is a character flaw of those characters I do think that the narration should have done more to flesh him out rather than other and fetishize him which is what it did in my opinion.

I do think the book did raise interesting questions on class and gender politics. The misogyny that can be in the gay community is very much examined here, as well as the fact a good number of the characters come from a place of privilege (even if they are from colonised countries like Columbia)

With all that said, if the one minor and one major issue I had with the book don't bother you then I do recommend giving this a read. But you would need to be in the right mood for it!

This was a tough read at times but I love something that makes you just a little uncomfortable. It was difficult, it pushes you away but despite that, you can’t stop reading it. Galapagos was a fever dream of a read; odd, unsettling and all together strange but that’s everything that I want in a book. It’s confusing and at times hard to follow but if you let go of the reins and let it take you where it takes you, I think you might just enjoy it.

It took me a while to get into this book. The way that it is written makes this a tough read in the beginning. Once you wrap your head around the unique writing style you will fly through this book. I enjoyed it, but it isn't for everyone.

This is an eerie book about a bunch of gay bohemians who decide to spend their last days with AIDS as it kills them sailing a boat around the European coast and basically fully living it up and eventually drifting towards the Galapagos. It's essentially a modern plague novel that focuses on how these men choose to meet their fate and art in the face of death. Gorgeous translation.

Galápagos by Fátima Vélez is a deeply immersive novel that explores human resilience, memory, and the ways we navigate loss and connection. Vélez’s writing is vivid and precise, drawing the reader into her characters’ inner worlds with elegance and emotional depth. The narrative reveals layers of grief, hope, and personal transformation that linger long after finishing the book.

I was especially drawn to how the story balances intimacy with broader philosophical reflections, making it both personal and expansive. The prose is engaging, the characters are nuanced, and the emotional stakes feel authentic throughout.

Note for readers and the publisher: This book is only accessible through the NetGalley app. I think it’s really frustrating to restrict it this way and it limits the potential reach and perspective for the author, even though this isn’t the author’s fault. The story itself is a good read, however the reading format issue makes it harder for people to engage.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Astra Publishing House for providing an advanced digital copy of this book.

This was a surreal story about a group of artists dying of AIDS. A central theme emerged around the desire to create in the face of death, but the novel touches on other aspects of illness, as well. It was occasionally gruesome, mostly in the second part, as it looked unflinchingly at the progression of the characters’ disease.

I was particularly struck by the first half of the novel, as we watch the characters first start to fall ill and die. The second half is a lot… weirder… as the characters embark on a voyage and spend their final days making up stories, sharing their histories, and making art. Here the author examines gender, class and sexuality.

It wasn’t my favorite novel but it was worth sitting with. I was really struck by how devastating HIV/AIDS was to this community of artists, and how relatively young the most affected age group was for this disease in the 80s-90s.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

I've read a couple stories featuring AIDS recently, which is obviously a difficult subject for many of us. Vélez has a way of honouring that very real and traumatic history while being experimental and dipping into body horror. This is helped by the almost-poetic or musical prose, which softens some of the more graphic moments.

At the start i thought this would be a critique of the lack of education around general health and definitely AIDS, especially in South America but I came out of it thinking it was a critique of wealth, aging culture and beauty standards. Maybe it was both and i don't think that's a bad thing. I enjoyed the flowing prose with sparse full stops, it was a fun game to spot them when they came up and it made lines with them more punchy. There were so many characters with little to no distinguishing features that it was difficult to tell everyone except a handful of characters apart. I did like the aimlessness of the narration which was in itself a discussion of how wealth doesn't make your life better or more interesting and the fact that the narration didn't shy away from the grotesqueness of what the characters were doing as it is inherently wrong. The whole story felt uneasy in a good way and I really liked the ending.

There were a few odd line breaks that I feel may have been a formatting error, but it didn't pull me out of the story. There were also a few words with no spaces in between.

An experimental book that focuses more on poetic language and theme exploration rather than plot or characters. The book is structured as two novellas with the first being a more grounded lead-up to the second's slipstream boat journey promised in the synopsis. At times the prose meandered a bit too far to be engaging, but there is plenty of striking imagery and visceral description of both physical and emotional carnage. The second novella felt stronger regarding structure and flow. I loved how unflinchingly the writer approaches queer themes, including our community's uglier facets. Overall, this novel is a strong addition to the modern queer canon.

Galapagos is a bizarre, simultaneous strangulation and unleashing of words, existing in a space somewhere between prose and poetry.

Fátima Vélez embraces all aspects of the human and reminds us that despite the supposed sophistication of the human species, we are gross beings. We lose teeth and fingernails, and at times we scab, peel, and leak pus. If not physically vile, we can be disgusting in our actions and beliefs, becoming violent, misogynistic, racist, elitist, greedy, and utterly unempathetic. The content of this book reflects all the things mentioned above (in addition to many other content warnings), which naturally makes it a difficult read. But Vélez, and the characters, find some beauty and companionship in the world amidst this.

The kind of community shown in Galapagos leans into the ‘otherness’ of queerness but is also brutally honest in depicting instances of ‘othering’ within queer spaces. The last part, the actual voyage, was the most interesting, as the ship carrying Lorenzo and his friends became a sort of microcosm of society. I particularly liked the scene where one of the characters goes overboard, and the others debate whether to save him or not:

“And though we’re all uneasy at the sound of a semi-living body hitting the water, we don’t do anything … What’s the difference between a hooked fish and a drowning man, between a lobster in a supermarket tank and a moribund man, both with pleading eyes.”

There isn’t a great deal of clear characterization, and I was only able to gain a vague shape and sense of each character. Vélez’s style, however, is at its most lucid and descriptive in the ‘body horror’ and distasteful moments. Weak stomachs beware. I’d be curious to learn more about the translation choices made for this book, especially considering the experimental style. Oddly enough, the lack of dialogue punctuation and the eccentric paragraph spacing harmonize with the strangeness of the story, creating something unique, unsettling, and fascinating in its form as much as in its content.

Thank you to Astra Publishing House and NetGalley for providing an ARC; all opinions are my own.

an interesting book with all the twists and turns literary stuff of the year would have you hope for. I think this is a good book that should be looked at more than it has been this year in online spaces I see. I would like to read more by this author in the future.

surreal and unique book that is utterly itself at every turn and always surprising and delighting in equal measure. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

Disturbing, enlightening, uncomfortable, hopeful, gross, meandering, sudden, intense, graphic, at times strange, almost always reminiscent of a fever dream… Galapagos is all of these words and so much more.

A life story told through a disjointed stream of consciousness, the first half of the novel flips and drops into the second, featuring a cast of characters caught up in the fragile vulnerability of deadly sickness. Each of them on a boat together, citizens aboard a voyage of the damned, each sharing the same viral curse that took so many in the formative years of what we now know as the AIDS Crisis.

This book was a gritty, dark, queer as hell journey through the mind of a man who doesn’t yet know he’s dying, or that many of his friends will soon join him in death. He only knows that his fingernails have fallen off, and that something is very wrong inside. The pus man has turned his eyes upon our narrator and his unkempt band of friends and acquaintances, and his grip will not be escaped.

I both struggled to read this story, yet couldn’t seem to tear myself away. The writing style is an almost constant steam of thought, of feeling and expression and suffering and gross pain and decomposition. It pulled me down into the depths of Lorenzo’s mind and wouldn’t let me back up for air until the very final page.

<i> and we don’t speak anymore because it’s too difficult, </i>

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

The rules fall apart, yet the coherence stays intact. I love when aesthetic “correctness” is pushed past its limit, but never slips into cheap absurdity. I love when things are spoken from the ground—from the ordinary, the physical, the overlooked. I love not understanding a thing and still enjoying every second. I love when something new is attempted, when risks are taken, when challenges are embraced. You don’t always arrive where you meant to, but you keep moving. This book began with a broken fingernail in Bogotá and crossed oceans of wild, relentless, fractured, unforgettable places, characters, and moments.

Wonderful. Thankyou so much for the arc.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. The novel is written in a stream of consciousness style, about a group of artists - I’m hesitant to call them friends - who begin to succumb to a mystery illness that we, the readers, recognise as AIDS. In response to this, they embark upon a cruise to the Galapagos Islands.

I don’t read a lot of novels that utilise stream of consciousness, but I think Velez did it very well here - part one is obsessive, compulsive, and neurotic in a way that is (distressingly!) familiar to anyone who’s watched their body fall apart on them. I thought I might find myself flagging a bit as I got further into the novel, but Velez would break it up by thrusting the reader into the most lush, vibrant descriptions that are so very visceral (a word that I think is what best describe the book as a whole) before pulling back to give you the barest of bones, if that. It kept me on my feet as a reader, letting me lull into the scene, and then finding myself having to think about every word choice. It has a very dream-like quality to it, particularly in the second part, that has you questioning if any of it is even real - are they alive? Are they dead? Does it even matter? There was also the way she wouldn’t shy away from showing you exactly how wretched and awful people were, but refusing to explicitly name it in a way that the reader can’t ignore. In all honesty, it made me feel a bit ill at times, and I put the novel down on several occasions.

Trying to properly organise how I feel about this novel has been frustrating, since it’s almost definitely referencing other works of literature (and history) that I’m unfamiliar with, and I feel like I lacked a richer reading experience because of that.

Thank you to Astra House and Netgalley for the advanced copy - it was much appreciated!

Dark, surreal, and absolutely overwhelming in the best way. Vélez follows a group of bohemian artists dying of AIDS on a final, fever‑dream voyage to the Galápagos — the prose writhes with decay, desire, and fragile beauty. It’s brutal, poetic, grotesque and heartbreaking all at once. A fierce cry for life, love, art — raw and unforgettable.

I loved the immersive storytelling and almost fantastical writing of this novel! Such an important story to share, and chock full of symbolism and deeper meanings to uncover. The characters were well developed and engaging, and I loved their interaction overtime.

I'm going to buy a physical copy of this book

I really like the writing style and command of voice
All the grotesque stuff makes me physically recoil but the writing is so mesmerizing, I have to read on

I'm only a quarter of the way through it but I need a copy to annotate so a full review to come later

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advance copy in exchange for honest feedback.