Atom Heart Mother

A son retraces his father’s journey across America to fly home with a herd of cows, in a singularly gripping novel of family memory and Spanish history spanning an entire century. In 1967, shortly before Agustín Fernández Mallo was born, his father – a veterinarian from a village in León, and a firm believer in science and progress – travelled across the United States with the aim of bringing a herd of cows by plane to Galicia. Almost half a century later, Fernández Mallo makes his own journey through the American heartland, attempting to retrace his father’s steps before he loses his memory. Atom Heart Mother spans a century of Spanish history through a web of family stories and legends. A bracing intellectual elegy for a parent and for a world that is slowly slipping away, this chimerical work of historical reconstitution is Agustín Fernández Mallo, one of the most ambitious and original Spanish-language authors, at his best and his most personal.

A son retraces his father’s journey across America to fly home with a herd of cows, in a singularly gripping novel of family memory and Spanish history spanning an entire century.