In her novel The Thai Woman (“La tailandesa”), Baboun presents us with Diana, a woman in her forties, at the verge of a turning point of her life. She feels trapped in both her private and professional life, not really connected to nobody and not even to herself and her body. She feels betrayed by Maxi, the man with whom she is living in the same apartment, and by Nancy, her supposed best friend, who snatched a role offer from under her nose and is now the TV starlet she could have been, instead of remaining a teacher at the high school where she has already studied herself. Thai boxing gives her a kick, a glimpse of self-empowerment. But only acting on stage enables her – herself and Moisés, Nancy’s little son with whom Diana “rehearses” a borrowed motherhood – to take a break from reality and to really feel free, to follow only herself without any outer rules, and to be who she really is.
Like Mieko Kawakamie, Baboun creates protagonists representing the contemporary woman, delving into different aspects of femininity and maternity, in an always entertaining, witty style and a highly original language. The Thai Women is a feminist novel of archaic force.

The novel Kid (“Cría”) focuses on the relationship between the narrator Zina and her parents, whose influence she believes she has escaped from in recent years. Zina lives in a small town in southern Chile with Joan, an older American woman, while she pretends to her parents that she is based in California. Her father has repeatedly beaten his wife and daughter and bullied them, and her mother, otherwise self-confident and fun-loving, has never managed to free herself from this situation. When she asks Zina to come home urgently because her father has to undergo heart surgery and could die, Joan encourages Zina to go along with the request, but not to regard it as a return home as her mother would like, but merely as a temporary visit. Zina agrees, but feels an anxiety settle on her chest, a shadow that reminds her of the gloom of her parents’ home. When Zina arrives in Santiago, she is caught up in the margins of the social unrest that shakes Chile in autumn 2019, in particular its capital city after the brutal deployment of security forces on 18 October. These events reflect her father’s violence, from which there also seems to be little escape. Her parents’ influence is revealed to be fully intact when her father’s heart surgery leads to complications that require a partial lung transplant. Ever the good daughter, Zina follows her mother’s pleas to help her father, and her spirit of resistance only stirs when she is being prepared for her own operation and the anaesthesia begins to take effect…