‘The country’s living national treasure … The stories overflow with the kind of insights that only maturity brings. They are also painfully topical … Fuentes keeps his finger on modern Mexico’s pulse’ - Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times

‘Fuentes, now 80, is still masterful in evoking the lives of damaged characters … beautifully observed … a book seething with timeless rancour’ - Independent

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A choral novel on the hopes, disillusionments and betrayals of family life in Mexico.
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A rich Catholic rancher wants his four sons to become priests, while the boys themselves have other plans; a bereaved mother explains her daughter’s life to the man who killed her; three daughters meet up around their father’s coffin for the first time in ten years; a middle-aged couple meet by chance on a cruise-ship and wonder if they were once young lovers. The result is a picture of contemporary Mexico seen through a violently fragmented narrative, not unlike the internationally successful film Amores Perros.

The stories are punctuated by a chorus, commenting as if in a Greek tragedy, crudely and unsentimentally on the underbelly of modern Mexican life, offering a raw but richly textured glimpse of the inequalities of that society - street children, junkies, dead rock icons, the ideal wife, a honeymoon gone wrong, a child suicide, a man faking his death and beginning a new life - that throw the middle-class dramas of the linked stories into harsh relief. Happy Families is a dramatic polyphony of the many conflicting strands of Latin America and the modern urban world.