The Family

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2022 by El País, El Cultural, El Mundo, La Vanguardia, ABC and Esquire, among others.

Winner of the Premio Cálamo Extraordinario 2022

Told through a mosaic of interlinked family stories spanning decades, acclaimed Spanish author Sara Mesa turns her wry humour and steely gaze on the family as an institution: the ideologies that shape it, the silences that undermine it, and the authority you can never quite escape.

‘There are no secrets in this family!’ proclaims Damián, the father. 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 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.

Told through a mosaic of interlinked family stories spanning decades, acclaimed Spanish author Sara Mesa turns her wry humour and steely gaze on the family as an institution: the ideologies that shape it, the silences that undermine it, and the authority you can never quite escape.