When writing a speculative history, the smart writer picks a period less documented for the creative space and artistic licence it offers. So, Yuri Herrera embroiders his latest novel, Season Of The Swamp, from the exile of political dissident Benito Juárez, an experience recorded by that individual in just two terse memoir lines.

Here he’s loafing around the coffee houses, bars and salons of 1850s New Orleans. Years later, he’ll return from that purgatory to his native Mexico, to be its first indigenous president. For much of the novel, that all feels incidental. The focus is not inwards onto that man, but looking out onto the city he finds himself in. Juárez is a fresh set of eyes through which to view this brave new world.

A kinetic establishing scene drops us into New Orleans’ chaos without knowledge or preparation, straight off the boat and as naïve to our new surroundings as its central character. The city is a contradiction. It’s a teeming metropolis rotting at the edges; aspirations of civility and modernity decomposing into the surrounding swampland. Juárez has witnessed the American capitalist machine working more subtly in New York and elsewhere, but recognises New Orleans as a city where you more clearly see the blood on the gold. The reason for this is one particular type of commerce: human beings.

Benito’s gradual recognition of this horror comes with a subtle change in the novel’s tone, interspersing floridly told grand-guignol scenes with starker and more spare use of language. Trade takes place on the city’s shore and Herrera lists commodities: ‘linen, spices, wood, wine’, ending abruptly with ‘people’. But there is still space to ridicule the nonsensical hierarchies around ethnicity and ideas of belonging which this melting-pot city holds. Season Of The Swamp is obsessed with language and what this signifies, communicating beyond the words themselves. Creole is viewed as a tongue unhitched from the dictionary and gone out for a stroll. Creoles themselves are broken down further into capital-C or small-c depending on background.

Herrera himself plays with language on the page. This is prose with a pulse, breaking grammatical rules and nodding to a jazz-like beat, at times full of repetition and a narrative voice that questions even itself. Moral blight is foreshadowed throughout, then comes to the fore with a sickness epidemic that terrorises the city and results in wild chapters told through first-person fever-dream perspectives.

All this thematic depth and formal mastery is captured in not much more than a novella. Like writers such as Claire Keegan, Denis Johnson and Andreï Makine, Yuri Herrera has the alchemy to conjure epics out of minimal literary real estate. Season Of The Swamp is a narrative that runs across a mere 18-month period and just 163 pages, yet somehow captures the world and everything in it.

Season Of The Swamp (translated by Lisa Dillman) is published by And Other Stories and is out now.