Death in Spring (Penguin European Writers) - Softcover

Rodoreda, Mercè

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241352541 ISBN 13: 9780241352540

Publisher: Penguin, 2018

Synopsis

'Soaringly beautiful, urgent and disturbing... A masterpiece.' Colm Tóibín, from the introduction

'Dark and beautiful and brilliant' Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall

Death in Spring is a dark and dream-like tale of a teenage boy's coming of age in a remote village in the Catalan mountains; a place cut off from the outside world, where cruel customs are blindly followed, and attempts at rebellion swiftly crushed. When his father dies, he must navigate this oppressive society alone, and learn how to live in a place of crippling conformity.

Often seen as an allegory for life under a dictatorship, Death in Spring is a bewitching and unsettling novel about power, exile, and the hope that comes from even the smallest gestures of independence.

'Rodoreda has bedazzled me' Gabriel Garcia Marquez

'Rodoreda's artistry is of the highest order' Diana Athill

'Read it for its beauty, for the way it will surprise and subvert your desires, and as a testament to the human spirit in the face of brutality and willful inhumanity.' Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing

'Utterly extraordinary' Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

About this title

About the Author

Mercè Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1908. During the Spanish Civil War she was exiled to France and later Switzerland. Rodoreda was only able to return to Barcelona in the mid-1960s, where she wrote several prize-winning novels in Catalan, including Death in Spring, which was inspired by her experience of Franco's dictatorship. Rodoreda died in 1983, a few years before Death in Spring's first publication, and is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century.

From the Back Cover

Death in Spring is a dark and dream-like tale of a teenage boy's coming of age in a remote village in the Catalan mountains; a place cut off from the outside world, where cruel customs are blindly followed, and attempts at rebellion swiftly crushed. When his father dies, he must navigate this oppressive society alone, and learn how to live in a place of crippling conformity. Often seen as an allegory for life under a dictatorship, Death in Spring is a bewitching and unsettling novel about power, exile, and the hope that comes from even the smallest gestures of independence.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241352541
• ISBN 13: 9780241352540
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160