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Laura FERRERO



Los astronautas

The Astronauts | Alfaguara/PRH. 2023


» 3rd reprint in 3 weeks after publication

In this book, Laura Ferrero shares a moving account of a family that never was, that disintegrated almost before she existed, and which left its mark on all three family members forever.

I had a family, but nobody ever told me about it. On December 26, 2018, I came into possession of a wayward photo of my mother, my father, and myself. When I saw it, it was the first time I used those two words together: my family. And that was also when this novel began. When I was a girl, I ping-ponged between divorced parents and their families. From those confusing years, there is a surviving doodle of my father dressed as an astronaut, and across the drawing I had scrawled the word NASA in enormous letters. Why had I chosen to make my father an astronaut in an enormous spacesuit, even though he worked at a bank?
On December 26, 2018, I decided to start writing a novel, a novel about my family. I got the notebooks and the recorder and sat down across from the protagonists—my father, my mother, and their respective partners—to ask a very simple question: what happened during those years that necessitated making every last vestige of it vanish? The result: they lied to me, so I tucked the novel away in a drawer, ostensibly forgotten. I picked it back up only when I found a way to tell the story of my family that, unbeknownst to me, had always been linked to those men and women—astronauts—who had traveled as far away as possible, farther than anyone had gone before, to understand what, ultimately, had always been within their reach.


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