The Cracks We Bear

A fearless exploration of motherhood and grief through the intimate fracture
between a daughter and her absent mother.

Catalina Infante delivers an emotionally unflinching account of a woman navigating early motherhood while haunted by the unresolved absence of her own mother. Laura has just given birth to Antonia and finds herself living in her childhood home, surrounded by the ghost of Esther, her late mother. As Laura attempts to mother her daughter, she begins to unravel the silent inheritance of trauma, exile, and unfinished love that shaped Esther’s life—and, unwittingly, her own.
Told in a confessional voice that blends raw vulnerability with sharp insight, the novel interweaves the protagonist’s present chaos—sleepless nights, fractured
intimacy, postpartum despair—with flashes of the past: political exile in France and Cuba, broken family ties, and a final journey north in search of lost roots. The result is a brave, lyrical meditation on what it means to mother without a model and to find one’s identity in the spaces left behind by others.