The Family

The Family

by Sara Mesa

£12.99

Pre-order for delivery on publication (1st July 2026) or subscribe to receive it early.

‘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.

Translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore

250pp, paperback with flaps, £12.99
ISBN: 978-1-916806-26-9
Publication date: 1 July 2026

Press & Reviews

'Sara Mesa’s writing is mysterious and fascinating: her characters brush against the limits in environments of fierce false calm. Un Amor is one of her best novels – tense and beautiful like a crouching bird.'–Mariana Enríquez, author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

'When I read Sara Mesa, I’m there in the Wild West, sifting through the sand. There is a restless enjoyment, an inhospitable beauty, in my sieve. And then something miraculous when gold appears before my eyes.'–Eva Baltasar, author of Boulder

'Sara Mesa sees the world through the lens of power, exploring how questions of strength and weakness shape human behaviour.’–Annie McDermott, The TLS

About The Book

Author

Sara Mesa is the author of eight works of fiction, including Un Amor (Selected as the ‘Best Book of 2020’ by El País, La Vanguardia, El Cultural and El Correo, and now a feature film), 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), Among the Hedges, and La Familia. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages, and she has been widely praised for her concise, sharp writing style.

Translator

Katie Whittemore is a graduate of the University of NH (BA), Cambridge University (M.Phil), and Middlebury College (MA), and was a 2018 Bread Loaf Translators Conference participant. Her work has appeared with Two Lines, The Arkansas International, The Common Online, Gulf Coast Magazine Online, The Los Angeles Review, The Brooklyn Rail and InTranslation.

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