Empty Houses
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Daniel disappeared three months, two days and eight hours after his birthday. He was three. He was my son.
Empty Houses unfolds in the aftermath of a child’s disappearance. His mother is distraught. As her life begins to unravel, she is haunted by his absence but also by her own ambivalence: did she even want him in the first place?
In a working-class neighbourhood on the other side of Mexico City another woman protects her stolen child. After longing desperately to be a mother, her life is violently altered by its reality. Alternating between these two contrasting voices, Empty Houses confronts the desires, regrets and social pressures of motherhood faced by both the mother who lost her child and the new one who risked everything to take him.
A literary sensation on its original publication, Empty Houses is a kaleidoscopic inquiry into contemporary Mexico and a provocative exploration of motherhood. It announces an intrepid and breathtaking new literary voice.
Brenda Navarro
Brenda Navarro is one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary authors in the Spanish language. Empty Houses is her first novel, and she lives in Madrid.
More by Brenda Navarro
Sophie Hughes
Translated by
Sophie Hughes is the translator of over twenty books from Spanish. She has been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times, and in 2021 she won the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize. Her work has featured in the New York Times, The Paris Review, the Guardian, Granta, frieze and The White Review.
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