In 1967, shortly before Agustín Fernández Mallo was born, his father – a veterinarian from a village in León, and a firm believer in science and progress – travelled across the United States with the aim of bringing a herd of cows by plane to Galicia.





Almost half a century later, Fernández Mallo makes his own journey through the American heartland, attempting to retrace his father's steps before he loses his memory.



Atom Heart Mother spans a century of Spanish history through a web of family stories and legends. A bracing intellectual elegy for a parent and for a world that is slowly slipping away, this chimerical work of historical reconstitution is Agustín Fernández Mallo, one of the most ambitious and original Spanish-language authors, at his best and his most personal.



Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña in 1967 and is a qualified physicist. His Nocilla Trilogy, published between 2006 and 2009, brought about an important shift in contemporary Spanish writing and paved the way for the birth of a new generation of authors, known as the 'Nocilla Generation'. In 2018, his novel The Things We've Seen won the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize. Atom Heart Mother is his sixth novel with Fitzcarraldo Editions.