The Family

The most devastating, intimate work to date from one of Spain’s most prominent authors

In The Family, Sara Mesa casts her unwavering gaze on the daily betrayals, small violences, and uneasy silences that shape a family from the inside out. With the restraint and clarity that have made her one of the most essential voices in Spanish literature, Mesa dismantles the illusion of domestic harmony, exposing how ideology and control curdle into lasting harm.

The father—a secular idealist obsessed with morality, order, and transparency—rules the household with quiet severity. Journals are monitored, routines enforced, food restricted, personal space denied. His wife, deferential and vague, withdraws into silence. Their three children—and Martina, a niece adopted under murky circumstances—each respond to his system in their own way: Damián, isolated and overweight, clings to small projects meant to please; Rosa, now a teacher, is a kleptomaniac; Aquilino, the youngest, attempts escape through reinvention and renaming himself; Martina tries to belong by suppressing her difference.

Told through a mosaic of precise, time-jumping vignettes, The Family reveals how a family’s core beliefs—about love, truth, freedom—can be twisted into tools of quiet domination. Mesa doesn’t sensationalize; she illuminates. A confiscated diary. A forbidden chocolate bar. A child crying in the bathroom. This is a novel about the things left unsaid, the damage done in the name of principle, and the long aftershocks of childhood.