‘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 toward 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 heart-breaking 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 those rare writers who can conjure horror and compassion with a lyricism as defiant as it is terrifying.' Marina Enriquez

‘It’s the story of a triple shipwreck, honest, audacious, courageous in the intimacy and everyday nature of what is told, whose umbilical cord is a language that is both stark and tender.’ Guillermo Busutil

‘Mother tries to place the reader in the eye of the hurricane of motherhood, and that is what literature often consists of, getting us involved with the great questions and challenges of today from an artistic and metaphorical point of view.’ David Felipe Arranz

ISBN-13: 9781836750086

Weight: 505 g

Format: Paperback

Country of Origin (language): Spain, Spanish

Language: Spanish tr. English

Pub Date: 25/06/2026

Page Extent: 256 Pages