A mesmerising and enigmatic collection of short stories, haunted by the horrors of war, never before translated into English, and divided into two halves: journeys and flowers.
A traveller embarks on a search for what lies beneath reality and finds villages where the dead walk at solstice, silkworm-like women live in cocoons, and a thousand men in gleaming armour play at being soldiers. Thirty-eight stories of invented flowers follow: absurd, lush and dreamlike, they capture different truths of humanity.
Mercè Rodoreda, in these beguiling, uncanny stories, fragments of beauty and darkness, combines inventive force and lyrical power in a poetic voice of indelible magnetism, and confirms herself as one of the greatest Catalan writers of the twentieth century.
‘Rodoreda had bedazzled me by the sensuality with which she reveals things within the atmosphere of her novels.’ Gabriel García Márquez
‘The un-self-conscious beauty and the phantasmagoric pain in her work add up to a kind of sharp, transportive pleasure.’ Jia Tolentino
‘Mercè Rodoreda’s artistry is of the highest order.’ Diane Athill
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