Leo Tolstoy’s famous line about all happy families being alike has a fatal flaw: there are no happy families. Happy moments, happy days, maybe even happy years—sure. But look closely enough, and you’ll find the trauma.

One way that ambitious authors explore these ordeals is by writing multigenerational epics that draw on historical events to illuminate the past and the present. Given how much Texans love a big story, it’s a little surprising that so few novelists have written books that stretch across the centuries to take advantage of our violent and event-filled history. Philipp Meyer’s The Son is a rare exception, though James Carlos Blake, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, and Larry McMurtry have all told era-spanning stories over the course of series of novels. (Oddly, two of the most famous epic novels about Texas were written by the not-exactly-Texan authors Edna Ferber and James A. Michener.)

As the presence of Blake’s and Hinojosa-Smith’s names on that short list suggest, Texas Latino writers seem to be particularly attracted to the format—a reflection, perhaps, of our extraordinarily long history here. Lately there’s been a surge in the publication of such books, which seems like more than a simple genre move; these writers—most of them women—are staking a claim for their ancestors, giving voice to people whose stories went untold for decades. 

The past half-dozen years have seen the appearance of Natalia Sylvester’s Everyone Knows You Go Home, V. Castro’s The Haunting of Alejandra, Rubén Degollado’s The Family Izquierdo, Kimberly Garza’s The Last Karankawas, and, just a few months ago, Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s thrilling western The Bullet Swallower. And now we have Marcela Fuentes’s debut novel, Malas (Viking, June 4), which follows the intertwined lives of two proud women and their families over the decades in La Cienega, a small fictional city on the north side of the Texas-Mexico border. 

Malas begins in 1951, as Pilar Aguirre’s happiness is about to crumble around her. (Remember what I said about happy families!) She’s eight months pregnant and her swollen feet are killing her, but she’s excited to accompany her husband, José Alfredo Aguirre, to a neighbor’s quinceañera. Before the party, she goes to see her best friend, Romi Muñoz, for a foot soak. Yet when she reaches Romi’s house, she encounters an unfamiliar older woman (her face “vinegary as a puckered apple”) who claims that she is José’s wife—and seems to place a curse on Pilar. A tragedy at the quinceañera later that evening confirms that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

The novel then fast-forwards to 1994, as Romi’s granddaughter Lulu Muñoz is getting ready for her own quince, which she’s dreading—a dread rooted, yet again, in familial unhappiness. Lulu’s father, Julio, spends much of his time drinking beer, listening to sad songs, and brooding on the past. The curse cast upon Pilar years ago has lingered, and when Pilar returns after an absence of many decades, the perpetually discontented Lulu finds herself drawn to the mysterious old woman.

Readers will piece together many of the book’s mysteries well before the characters do. Because Fuentes jumps back and forth between past and present (that is, the mid-nineties), we’re granted a sort of semi-omniscience. When we read the chapters set in the mid-twentieth century, we’ve glimpsed the future consequences of the characters’ actions. Our grasp of what’s going on in the later-set passages is informed by a close-up view of the past that most of the characters lack. 

This sense that Pilar, Lulu, and Julio are, to a certain extent, stumbling around without a clue feels purposeful. Though multigenerational epics usually spell out the causes and effects that explain how one generation’s choices lead to their descendants’ triumphs and tragedies, none of the characters are privy to the grand narrative sweep that the reader enjoys. The question of whether children and their parents can ever really understand one another is at the heart of many such books, and Malas offers a clear answer: no, they can’t. 

Lulu, Pilar, and Julio learn many of the facts, but no matter how close any of us are to our families, we’ll never really know what it was like to endure our forebears’ lives. We can record long testimonials and stay up all night trading stories, but that takes us only so far. Our ancestors’ deepest hopes and fears are lost in the space between the lived experience and the tale. That’s what novels are for; that’s what Malas does.

Austin writer Richard Z. Santos is the author of the novel Trust Me.

This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Next Great Texas Epic.” Subscribe today.