- Published: 19/06/2025
- ISBN: 9781803511405
- Granta Books
- 176 pages
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Irene Solà
Translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, witches, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party.
As day turns to night, four hundred years’ worth of memories unspool, and the house reverberates with the women’s stories. Stories of mysterious visions, of those born without eyelashes and tongues or with deformed hearts. But it begins with the story of the matriarch Blanca who double-crosses the devil, heedless of what the consequences might be.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a formally daring and entrancing novel in which Irene Solà explores the duality and essential link between light and darkness, life and death, oblivion and memory.
£14.99
'Forged from the deepest and truest stories about the perversity of the body, the sheer drama of the natural world, and the vengeful side of the divine. A fecund and daring book'
Catherine Lacey
'Irene Solà is unlike any other writer - she storms her own path, setting fire to all our preconceived notions of what a novel can do while she goes. I adored this book'
Daisy Johnson
Irene Solà is unlike any other writer - she storms her own path, setting fire to all our preconceived notions of what a novel can do while she goes. I adored this book
Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under
From the Same Author
When I Sing, Mountains Dance
Irene Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem
When Domenec – mountain-dweller, father, poet, dreamer – dies suddenly, struck by lightning, he leaves behind two small children, Mia and Hilari, to grow up wild among the looming summits of the Pyrenees and the ghosts of the Spanish civil war.
But then Hilari dies too, and his sister is forced to face life’s struggles and joys alone. As the years tumble by, the inhabitants of the mountain – human, animal and other – come together in a chorus of voices to bear witness to the sorrows of one family, and to the savage beauty of the landscape. This remarkable English-language debut is lyrical, mythical, elemental, and ferociously imaginative.
Irene Solà on Granta.com
Fiction | The Online Edition
There Was a Farmer Had a Dog
Irene Solà
‘A twenty-five-kilo dog is too small to survive in the countryside.’
An extract from Irene Solà’s forthcoming novel, translated by Mara Faye Lethem.
In Conversation | The Online Edition
In Conversation
Eva Baltasar & Irene Solà
‘The tide carries my books from my head to a place that is no longer mine.’
The authors discuss friendship, the sea and finishing their novels.
Poetry | The Online Edition
Five Poems
Irene Solà
‘I wore off my tongue / like candy’ Translated from the Catalan by Oscar Holloway.