As Philip Larkin famously wrote, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.’ Eight-year-old Claudia, the protagonist in award-winning Colombian author Pilar Quintana’s latest novel, is a case in point. Her mother, obsessed with celebrity suicides and struggling with her own demons, is largely absent – if not physically, then certainly emotionally. Her father escapes into work and silence. When her parents do communicate with her, it is often with a casual cruelty and disregard for what their daughter might need or want to hear.
They live as an uneasy but functioning unit, until Claudia’s mother starts an affair with her sister-in-law’s new husband, at which point things start to fall apart. Claudia tries to navigate the twists and turns of her parents’ relationship, while not fully understanding what is going on or how to express her fear that she will be abandoned by them.
