Fabricio Tocco launches his novel "Parece diciembre"

Fabricio Tocco, who teaches Latin American literature at the Australian National University, has published the novel Parece diciembre ("It looks like December"; Buenos Aires and London: Equidistancias, 2025). He launched it at Smith's Alternative in Canberra with Chilean scholar Thomas Nulley-Valdés, at the University of Sydney with Argentine scholar Fernanda Peñaloza, and at La Trobe University with Spanish scholar Alfredo Martínez Expósito.

The novel, written in Spanish, is now in its second edition. In Australia it is available from Lost in Books in Sydney or print-on-demand through Amazon. You can also listen to a conversation about the book on SBS Spanish.

Synopsis

Argentina, December 2001. What is it like to leave a country in flames? How do you say goodbye to your language, your streets, a story you will never get to finish? Piero, a teenager whose childhood was split between São Paulo in Brazil and the western suburbs of Greater Buenos Aires, has no say in the matter: his family has decided to leave again, this time for Europe. Amid the thrill of rock, the discovery of tango, a political and literary awakening and the last nights with friends, Piero faces the vertigo of leaving everything behind once more. Years later, in Europe, he writes a novel about those days — but his family and friends question it: was it really like that? Or does memory, like literature, also make things up? Parece diciembre is a novel about growing up amid collapse and uprooting, the search for a solid identity in a changing world, the dilemma of staying or leaving, and the distance between remembering and telling.