The protagonists of this novel are misunderstood women who suffer from motherhood in private: Emma is eight months pregnant when she faces the unexpected loss of her baby; Jhanet is a teenage girl raised by her grandmother in Bolivia who decides to cross the ocean to find the mother she so desperately needs and barely knows and ends up getting pregnant accidentally; Natalka is an Ukranian woman trapped in an abusive relationship with a violent man who pressures her to act as a surrogate mother without her being convinced. All of them feel that they are mothers, despite the fact that society does not recognize them as such.

In this novel, Laia Aguilar, with her lucid and transparent prose unfolds a dazzling story of three women, "the other mothers, the non-mothers, the misunderstood", and gives voice to all those "invisible maternities" claiming that being a mother can also be something that does not fit in the canon.

Other Mothers intersects the three stories to build a choral story about the most intimate pains and, at the same time, the inner forces that push us to overcome them since, after all, this is a novel focused on optimism and hope.

English sample available.

Laia Aguilar Sariol (Barcelona, 1976) has a degree in Audiovisual Communication. She combines book writing with screenwriting and teaches Creative Writing at the Ateneu Barcelonès writing school. In 2020 she was awarded the Josep Pla Prize for her novel Pluja d'estels [Rain of Kites]. In recent years she has published the juvenile works Wolfgang (extraordinary), which won the 2016 Carlemany Prize and the 2018 Atrapallibres Prize; Wolfgang, el secret del pare [Wolfgang, the father's secret], the continuation of the first novel; and Juno (2018), also a finalist for several prizes. Invisible mothers is her second novel for adults.