Atom Heart Mother (A Novel)

A son re-creates his dying father’s journey from fifty years ago, illuminating a strange, beguiling portrait of a century of Spanish history, and the fading memories of their relationship.

In this captivating tightrope act of autofiction, Agustín Fernández Mallo shares the story of two parallel journeys taken by a father and a son—each separated by half a century of Spanish history and their own complex and layered relationship.

In 1967, the father of Mallo’s narrator (also Agustín Fernández Mallo), a veterinarian from the Galician countryside and a firm believer in the power of science, undertakes a trip through America, hoping to return with a herd of cows. Fifty years later, as his father’s memory begins to fade and his famous scientific objectivity begins to fail him, Mallo embarks on his own journey through the United States, attempting to bring the past back to life. Even as he restages scenes from his father’s American sojourn, he is visited by memories of their shared life and of the era that preceded it—a fast-disappearing century of Spanish history and family lore.

Atom Heart Mother is a profound work of historical reckoning that weaves between the personal and the universal, creating a dazzling rumination on the strange bonds that tie us to our families and to the worlds (remembered and present) that we live in. A bracing intellectual elegy for a parent and for a world that is slowly slipping away, this chimerical work of historical reconstitution casts death not as the end of a long path but rather as a beginning—a lesson to live by, imparted from a loved one.