The Only Daughter, Guadalupe Nettel

Shortly after reaching eight months of pregnancy, Alina is told that her daughter will not survive birth. She and her partner then embark on a painful but also surprising process of acceptance and grieving. That last month of gestation becomes for them a strange opportunity to get to know this daughter whom they find so hard to give up. Laura, Alina's great friend, recounts this couple's conflict, while reflecting on love and its sometimes incomprehensible logic, but also on the strategies that human beings invent to overcome frustration. Laura also tells us the story of her neighbor Doris, a single mother of a charming child with behavioral problems.

Written with only apparent simplicity, La hija única is a profound and wise novel about motherhood, about its denial or its embrace; about the doubts, uncertainties, and even feelings of guilt that surround it; about the joys and anxieties that accompany it. It is also a novel about three women – Laura, Alina, Doris – and the bonds – of friendship, of love – they establish between them. A novel about the diverse forms that family can take in today's world.