Merce Rodoreda

Lushly surreal, Rodoreda's masterpiece is a mythological depiction of a city ruled by rituals, almost like Franco's Spain. Death in Spring tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town—burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that...

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. Journeys and Flowers by Mercè Rodoreda, in these...

'A small masterpiece' COLM TOIBIN, DAILY TELEGRAPH 'The most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War' GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ 'Rodoreda's writing pays such fierce and tender attention to the experience of being alive, and the tempest that ordinary life can be' HELEN OYEYEMI When we were all alone, and everyone was in bed and the streets empty, he...