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The most devastating, intimate work to date from one of Spain’s most prominent authors
"There are no secrets in this family!" proclaims Damián, the father, triumphantly. A secular idealist obsessed with morality and order, he is blind to the cracks in his home’s foundations, the oppression that pervades it, and the elaborate fictions his wife and four children devise to survive it. While he quotes Gandhi and expounds on the virtues of education, charity and thrift, the children retreat into humiliated compliance or seek freedom in the most dangerous of places.
Through a mosaic of interlinked tales, spanning decades, acclaimed Spanish author Sara Mesa turns her unflinching gaze to the family as institution: the ideologies that shape it, the silences that undermine it, and the authority you can never quite escape.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Sara Mesa is the author of eight novels and three story collections, including Scar (winner of the Ojo Critico Prize), Four by Four (a finalist for the Herralde Prize), An Invisible Fire (winner of the Premio Málaga de Novela), Un Amor: A Novel, Among the Hedges, and Bad Handwriting. Her works have been translated into more than ten different languages, and she has been widely praised for her concise, sharp writing style.
Katie Whittemore translates from Spanish. Her translations include novels by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durán, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, Katixa Agirre, Jon Bilbao, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Almudena Sánchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adón. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 for Lara Moreno’s In Case We Lose Power, and has been a finalist for the Spain USA Foundation Translation Prize and the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize, and shortlisted for the National Translation Award.
