Mother by Marina Perezagua

‘One of those rare writers who can conjure horror and compassion with a lyricism as defiant as it is terrifying’ MARIANA ENRIQUEZ, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

My mother lingered on the threshold between my life and my death, inhabiting it with the levity and nonchalance that had always marked her treatment of me.

A young woman and her mother spend a day at the beach. Soon the woman is in labour, three months early. At the hospital she slips from the glare of the lights towards the deep shadows of her own childhood, while doctors and nurses fight to keep her and her baby alive.

Moving with dreamlike intensity between a heartbreaking past and a heart-stopping present, this fearless novel asks: in longing for a child do we also long to break free of a mother? And what was it that happened exactly, that day at the beach?

‘Marina Perezagua is one of the best of the new generation of Spanish writers.’ SALMAN RUSHDIE