- Published: 04/05/2023
- ISBN: 9781783788255
- Granta Books
- 208 pages
When I Sing, Mountains Dance
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.
£8.99
When I Sing, Mountains Dance made me swoon. Translated with great musicality and wit, it is rich and ranging, shimmering with human and non-human life, the living and the dead, in our time and deep time; a fable that is utterly universal, deadly funny and profoundly moving
Max Porter
There's so much beauty in this wonderful polyphonic novel. Each page makes you fall in love again with nature, with imagination, with words, with life. When I Sing, Mountains Dance is timeless and unique
Mariana Enríquez
Like nothing I've read before. This novel is a feral, yowling love howl to a place of such staggering majesty that it resists usual comprehension. By giving voice to animals, storms, outcasts, one-legged girls, birthing women, and the mountain itself, Solà pushes past the limits of human experience to tell a story of instinct and earth-time that is irresistible in its jagged glory.
C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills is Gold
From the Same Author
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
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.
