‘No Place to Bury the Dead’ is a moving meditation on migration, displacement and loss

Book Review No Place to Bury the Dead By Karina Sainz Borgo Random House: 256 pages, $26 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. In a fictional town not far from the border of an unnamed Latin American country, a woman named Visitación Salazar has made it her mission to provide a resting place for the unlucky dead — those who have been abandoned or whose families can’t afford to bury them elsewhere. Into this tense situation comes Angustias Romero, the protagonist of the second novel by the Venezuelan journalist Karina Sainz Borgo, “No Place to Bury the Dead,” translated from Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer. Yet the plot isn’t really the point of “No Place to Bury the Dead,” which often dwells on quiet moments of pain, showcasing the small ways a migration crisis robs people of their dignity. Late in the book, Angustias addresses Visitación’s strangely proprietary relationship with the cemetery inhabitants she refers to as “My dead”: “There was one and only one truth, and nothing could change it: all these men and women were dead, and they were never coming back.