Mother

‘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.’

After going into premature labour, an unnamed protagonist reflects on her troubled relationship with her mother and its role in her traumatic birth experience. Mother takes readers on a journey of motherhood, present and past, weaving gracefully between painful flashbacks, intertextual allusions and heartbreaking descriptions of nurses and doctors fighting to keep the protagonist and her baby alive. All the while the ocean lingers, raising the question: What happened at the beach?

Marina Perezagua is praised by readers and critics for her powerfully visual and mind-bending narrative, making her truly unique within the Spanish literary scene. Her work has been featured in several Latin American anthologies, and her stories have appeared in Electric Literature, Granta en Espanol, Granta UK and Maaboret (in Hebrew).

She has a degree in History of Art and obtained her PhD in New York, where she has lived since 2001, working as a Distinguished Professor in Residence at New York University.

Robin Myers is a highly experienced Spanish translator. She has translated several award-winning authors including Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Andrés Neuman and Cristina Rivera Garza. She has received the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship and she was shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize.