Happy Families - Tapa dura

PRAISE FOR 'THE EAGLE'S THRONE' '[Fuentes] writes with an energy, passion and humour that are as compelling now as when he first published a novel, more than forty years ago ... rattlingly good entertainment' Daily Telegraph 'Fuentes at his satirical best, mixing political wisdom, biting wit and poignant self-realisation' Scotland on Sunday 'Smashing ... the most wickedly entertaining novel of Fuentes's career ... elegant and funny ... brilliant' New York Times

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. Every Happy Family is a dramatic polyphony of the many conflicting strands of Latin America and the modern urban world.