The latest work from the grand master of Mexican fiction.
A choral novel on the hopes, disillusionments and betrayals of family life in Mexico. A rich Catholic rancher wants his four sons to become priests, while the boys themselves have other plans; a bereaved mother explains her daughter’s life to the man who killed her; three daughters meet up around their father’s coffin for the first time in ten years; a middle-aged couple meet by chance on a cruise-ship and wonder if they were once young lovers. The result is a picture of contemporary Mexico seen through a violently fragmented narrative, not unlike the internationally successful film Amores Perros.
The stories are punctuated by a chorus, commenting as if in a Greek tragedy, crudely and unsentimentally on the underbelly of modern Mexican life, offering a raw but richly textured glimpse of the inequalities of that society – street children, junkies, dead rock icons, the ideal wife, a honeymoon gone wrong, a child suicide, a man faking his death and beginning a new life – that throw the middle-class dramas of the linked stories into harsh relief. Happy Families is a dramatic polyphony of the many conflicting strands of Latin America and the modern urban world.

"Fuentes, now 80, is still masterful in evoking the lives of damaged characters … beautifully observed … a book seething with timeless rancour." (Independent)
"The country’s living national treasure … These and other tales add up to a powerful indictment of the unhappiness caused by family life … The stories overflow with the kind of insights that only maturity brings. They are also painfully topical … Fuentes keeps his finger on modern Mexico’s pulse." (Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times)
"What makes this book doubly and triply beguiling, beyond the challenging storytelling and stylistics, is our feeling that Fuentes is trying, yet only implicitly and subtly, to probe deeper into this malaise … This is an exacting literary journey. But there are, as always, magic and poetry in Fuentes’ prose (not overlooking the very accomplished and natural translation of it by Edith Grossman) that make the journey worthwhile." (The Times)