A stone statue of a mother holding a baby. There is an arch in the background

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

In her novel Still Born, shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel lit a fuse under the theme of motherhood. “Being a mother means being worried about someone else all the time,” mused its narrator Laura, explaining why she preferred to remain childless.

Mothers — and the labours of parenthood, more generally — feature prominently in Nettel’s latest book, an unnerving collection of short stories in which the comforting conventions of family life are examined, challenged and subverted.

“Having children is to always be waiting for someone,” says the narrator of “Playing With Fire”, in which an idyllic family escape to the Mexican countryside turns sour. It is one of two pandemic-related stories in this volume.

The other is “The Torpor”, a sinisterly dystopian tale set in a permanently locked-down world in which the free press has been abolished (journalists are rumoured to be “highly active agents of infection”) and news bulletins claim that climate change is “a superstition held by uninformed people”. The protagonist is a teacher who has only ever met her students online (“this helps to avoid any of the extra-professional attachments such as we used to see”). In these circumstances, sleep offers the best escape — and almost becomes an act of rebellion. “In dreams,” says the narrator, “I am not married, or not always, and nor do I have a family . . . dreams are the most interesting thing going on in my life.”

The absence of maternal affection is conspicuous in “The Fellowship of Orphans”, in which the protagonist recalls growing up “in a public institution where I shared a room with fifteen other children who cried, as I did, in their bunkbeds at night whenever they thought about the families they had lost or the ones they wished they had”. This upbringing explains one of the narrator’s fixations: “few things intrigue me more than actual mothers, looking as they do so different to the idealized version I have always had of them.”

In “Imprinting”, a hospital visit leads to a young woman’s chance encounter with an estranged relative, inexplicably banished from family events. “I had read something about the traces left in our memory by the touch and scent of those we come into contact with in the first few years of our lives,” she writes. “Imprinting, I think it’s called. According to the article, this bodily mark is where family ties are cemented.” The real nature of those family ties, however, often conceals darker corners. Another story, “A Forest Under the Earth”, suggests that, tangled as they are, family bonds are difficult to escape.

“The Pink Door” is one of the collection’s more light-hearted stories. When a new neighbourhood arrival disrupts his marital routine, a mildly dissatisfied husband discovers the wisdom of the time-honoured adage: be careful what you wish for. “When I recall that day,” the man says, “it is all I can do not to blush and feel flooded by a profound nostalgia, because since then, my life has never been the same again.”

A blue book jacket with the title and author’s name in white

Another unhappy husband is at the centre of “Life Elsewhere”, the title of which echoes a line in a poem by Arthur Rimbaud. A failed actor living in Barcelona becomes obsessed with the tenants of an apartment he and his wife were unable to secure. He covets — and ends up vicariously inhabiting — the life of a more successful fellow performer.

The titular story focuses on the friendship between the unnamed narrator — a young girl — and Camilo, the son of Uruguayan political refugees living in Mexico in the 1970s. The title is a reference to those albatross birds that have been blown off-course and find themselves living alone and far from their natural habitats.

Oscillating between realism and dark fantasy, and impeccably translated by Rosalind Harvey, the stories in The Accidentals are delightful and disturbing, and confirm Nettel as one of the finest Mexican writers of her generation.

The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey, Fitzcarraldo £12.99/Bloomsbury $25.99, 128 pages

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The Accidentals — Guadalupe Nettel’s visions of a darker side of motherhood