Mothers

Every summer has its readings. There are those who look for mystery novels for beach afternoons, those who prefer pending classics, or those who take advantage of the holidays to approach new voices. This year I propose an unusual common thread: motherhood. Not so much understood as a domestic theme, but as an untamed territory where memory, identity, affections, and social transformations intersect. 

Contemporary literature, from Maxim Gorky and Marcel Proust to Annie Ernaux or María Negroni, has found in the maternal figure one of the best ways to interrogate the past and understand who we are. Recently, Canarian literature (and that of La Gomera in particular) has taken up this mantle, making mothers the protagonists of some of its most interesting works. They are present and absent figures, caregivers and cared for, remembered or lost. Through them, family stories are told, but also the history of the islands themselves. 

The first recommendation is La madre de Hans Müller (Editorial Siete Islas, 2026), by Pepe Betancort. The author abandons here the humor to which he has accustomed us in titles such as Cincuenta kilos de tomate or Las perlas de Eufemia Montelongo, but maintains his umbilical cord intact with the landscape of Lanzarote and his beloved Arrecife. The novel reconstructs Arrecife as it was in the sixties, a time before the development of tourism, where the city appears as a living and intimate space. To this environment, which still retains the slowness and beauty of another era, arrives a young German marked by the unexpected disappearance of his mother. His path intertwines with that of Pedro "el Caboso," a young orphan, continuing with delicacy the exploration of affective and LGTBI identity that Betancort already hinted at in his novella El Roque del Este (Caballos azules, 2025). 

Very different, but equally essential and also under the Siete Islas publishing label, we find La madre hueca, by Ismael Lozano. Recognized with the Arkoiris Award 2024 for best writer from the Canary Islands for his constant commitment to visibility and inclusive literature, Lozano delves this time into the territory of absence. Set on the island of La Palma, the mother appears here as a wound, a void. With writing of great sensitivity, the novel explores family silences and those emotional fractures that often define a lineage. 

From poetry comes Jacintos y galletas (Ediciones La Palma, 2025), by Tina Suárez Rojas. It is a beautiful elegy written after the death of her mother, where she addresses grief and writing becomes a bridge between absence and memory. In a similar vein of fragility and rawness is a recommendation that is not new: Ropavieja (Editorial Dieci6, 2021), by Lana Corujo. In this collection of poems with a narrative tone, motherhood appears linked to illness. Corujo shows how a daughter accompanies her mother in her physical deterioration and how traditional roles are inverted in a daily effort to preserve memory.

To these individual works, and for those who enjoy the brevity of short stories, two choral proposals are added that broaden the portrait towards a collective territory: the anthology Madres (Ediciones La Palma, 2024), promoted by Elsa López and coordinated by Juan Carlos de Sancho, in which twelve Canarian authors participate, and the Antología Madre (Mercurio Editorial, 2024) coordinated by Berbel, collecting stories, poems, and testimonies from 151 women from 43 different countries around the maternal figure. 

The great lesson that all these books share is that mothers are never only mothers: they are also landscape and memory. And it is precisely by expanding that idea that we discover that the line of care in the Canary Islands does not stop at the nuclear family structure, but unfolds into a broader, communal, and almost invisible network, where old age acquires a central role. In that transition, mothers are prolonged and sometimes transform into grandmothers, figures who not only safeguard daily life but also the memory of who we were. 

That continuity, this relevance of the role of grandmothers, is perceived with special clarity in poetry collections such as Soo (La Bella Varsovia, 2023), by Juli Mesa, or Cuando las naranjas (Ediciones La Palma, 2026), by Antonio Martín Piñero, and, very significantly, in works such as Las galletas (Plasson&Bartleboom, 2026) by Óscar Liam, where the grandmother emerges as a figure of refuge and emotional transmission. In the same way, and from a wild and raw register, Andrea Abreu in her unforgettable Panza de burro (last recommendation for stragglers who have not yet read it) had already addressed the shared care between grandmothers, mothers and neighbors as the true sustenance of life in the insular periphery. In that world, as we all know, upbringing does not belong to a single home: it is shared and learned in community. 

Reading these books during the summer is an invitation to rethink the family - with whom we are lucky enough to share more time during these months - from care rather than from biological ties. In these stories of women, silent or luminous, which I recommend, the transformation of the islands and the way in which each generation tries to understand its own past is also drawn.