The Cracks We Bear
Michelle Mirabella
(Translator)
This title will be released on:
Nov 4, 2025
Description
Instead of joy, she feels fear, and then anger at her own late mother for her absence. The Cracks We Bear opens as a story about new motherhood. Soon, however, it reveals itself to be an exploration of memory and trauma as Laura starts to recall her childhood in Chile. Born in exile to staunchly communist parents, she returns to Chile with her mother after the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In the fledgling democracy she grows up in, topics of capitalism and communism are ever present. Laura's reflections, born from personal experience, are interwoven with raw and honest memories of her family life. Borrowing elements from the Bildungsroman, and pulling from the Latin American short story tradition, Catalina Infante recounts Laura's past in vignettes. Piece by piece, the short chapters come together like a reconstructed vase, bearing its cracks.
Product Details
| Publisher | World Editions |
| Publish Date | November 04, 2025 |
| Pages | 118 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781642861594 |
| Dimensions | N/A |
About the Author
Catalina Infante Beovic is a Chilean writer, publisher, and co-owner of Librería Catalonia in Chile. She has written three books of stories of the indigenous peoples of Chile with Sonia Montecino, anthropologist and recipient of the Chilean National Social Sciences Award. She published her first book of short stories, Todas somos una misma sombraI, in 2018, followed by her English-language debut, Ferns. Published in 2020 by World Literature Today, Ferns was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and adapted into a short film by director Paz Ramírez. Infante's short stories and poems have appeared in World Literature Today, Columbia Journal, the HarperCollins Daughters of Latin America anthology, and the Deep Vellum Best Literary Translations anthology. The Cracks We Bear is Infante Beovic's first full-length novel translated into English.
Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish-to-Englishliterary translator. In addition to her translation of Catalina Infante's debut
novel, The Cracks We Bear, her work appears in the anthologies Best
Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024) and Daughters of
Latin America (HarperCollins, 2023), as well as in venues such
as World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today,
and Southwest Review. A former ALTA Travel Fellow, Michelle holds
an M.A. in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute and is
an alumna of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and the Bread
Loaf Translators' Conference. Find more of her work at www.michellemirabella.com.
Reviews
"Reflective, sensitive, and often moving, Catalina Infante's first novel revolves around a mother-daughter relationship, its silences, distances, and cracks." --La Tercera
"A poignant story, full of touching moments that approach motherhood from a more human perspective. It addresses the fears, exhaustion, and disappointment of first-time mothers who feel suffocated by overwhelming social mandates. Catalina Infante constructs a vision of motherhood that is terrifying, and describes a facet of motherhood that is not portrayed in magazines, TV shows, or movies." --Infobae
"A literary composition somewhere between a confessional diary and a costumbrista's work that portrays society with some sarcasm, but also with the necessary dose of tenderness and hope. The author outlines, with a beautifully feminine intimacy, the shaken Chile of the last 30 year. The novel gives voice to an uprooted Chilean daughter of political exiles, in search of her own intimate identity, in a country that was foreign to her from the very moment of her birth." --Cine y literatura
"A very personal, intimate book that explores longings, doubts, tiredness, and social pressures connected to motherhood, and the need to return to normality, to recover oneself, one's own body." --Bio Bio Chile
"Catalina Infante writes with empathy about loneliness, grief, fears, exile, motherhood, and the relationship of mothers with feminism." --Culturizarte
"When her daughter Antonia is born, Laura thinks of Esther, her mother. A mother who was not especially loving, who thought the best inheritance was a good education. A mother with whom Laura had may differences, and who died from cancer when she was 18. Laura finds photos and postcards that Esther never sent; she relives vague and elusive moments in her memory, and discovers that she did not know the woman who lived in her mother." --La Tercera
"The Cracks We Bear is a 'real, ' concrete, human story full of small details ... a story about being a daughter, and a mother, in a society that idealizes motherhood." --Futuro
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