3 Novels About Mothers on the Brink

Mothers

From Mexican writer Lozano (Witches) comes a smashing novel set in 1946, as a wave of kidnappings shock and scandalize northern Mexico. Gloria Felipe, mother of five, discovers one morning that her youngest daughter, also named Gloria, has vanished while playing hopscotch. The police, led by Capt. Ruben Dario “Two Poems” Hernandez, come to Felipe’s aid, but are stymied by false leads from opportunists looking for a quick payday. The real culprit is a working-class woman named Nuria Valencia Perez, who has been struggling to conceive. Nuria rechristens the younger Gloria as Agustina and forcibly adopts her into her own struggling family while keeping her under lock and key. What ensues is equal parts detective story, family drama, and social novel, as Two Poems’s daring rescue attempts are intercut with Gloria’s and Nuria’s efforts to keep their families together and earn approval as women capable of motherhood. “There’s no greater force in the world than desire,” Lozano writes. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a mother.” Through newspaper clippings, interior monologues, and set pieces in police stations, orphanages, and other institutions, Lozano crafts a darkly comic and deeply human narrative. It’s an unforgettable portrait of maternal envy gone mad. (Oct.)

Unfit

Harwicz (Die, My Love) spins an unrelenting tale of a migrant woman who takes drastic steps to fulfill her radical conception of motherly love. Lisa Trejman, an Argentinian living in rural France, desperately waits for updates regarding the custody case over her twin sons J and E, after her husband, Armand, reported her for domestic abuse. Alone and with no support system, she resorts to a rash and unthinkable course of action: setting fire to her parents-in-law’s house in the middle of the night and kidnapping her children in the ensuing mayhem. As she’s inundated with calls and messages from Armand during her “adventure” across France with the twins, as she calls it, the true toxic nature of the couple’s relationship slowly comes into focus, as does the insidious xenophobic scheming of Armand’s controlling parents. Eventually, Lisa decides to reveal their location to Armand, and the family is briefly reunited for a few chaotic but happy nights, before the couple’s violent pattern inevitably rears its ugly head, leading to an explosive and haunting ending. Harwicz’s assured pacing is bolstered by her gorgeous and often darkly funny prose, immaculately translated by Mendez Sayer: “Love,” says Lisa, “is hundreds of aggressive monkeys looting and pillaging believers at the entrance to a Buddhist temple.” The result is a wild and unforgettable ride. (Oct.)

The White Hot

The potent debut novel from playwright and memoirist Hudes (My Broken Language) follows a single mother who abandons her daughter to try and find herself. The story takes the form of a letter written by April Soto, 26, to her 10-year-old daughter, Noelle, which Noelle is meant to read when she turns 18. The mother and daughter live with April’s mother and grandmother in Philadelphia, and April plans to leave Noelle there for 10 days to clear her head and rid herself of the “white hot,” a seething rage that regularly washes over her, due in part to the burden of childcare and her dead-end job. April spends several days in Pittsburgh before heading back east, determined to confront Noelle’s father, who abandoned her when she was pregnant. Early on, the reader learns that April has been missing from Noelle’s life ever since she left, and Noelle is now reading the letter as she’s about to finish high school. The end of April’s letter is gut-wrenching, but the novel offers profound clarity, particularly in how it traces the roots of April’s anger and restlessness to her grandmother’s migration from Puerto Rico in the 1980s and other generational traumas (“My anger had launched a voyage and voyages were my birthright”). This sizzles. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME. (Nov.)