Antònia Carré-Pons recommends an irreverent and hilarious book to get through the heatwave

BarcelonaWith La gran família (Club Editor, 2025), the writer and editor Antònia Carré-Pons (Terrassa, 1960) has won the last Òmnium award for best novel of the year. An avid reader of new releases and classics, Carré-Pons is clear about which book to recommend for this summer: Cosdiví, by Theodore Sturgeon, which Males Herbes has published in Catalan with a translation by Josep Sempere.

"It's an irreverent and hilarious book that is very good for helping to get through the heat. Sturgeon is best known for his fiction works – Carré-Pons comments. And this is a brilliant one: the divine body is that of Jesus Christ, who walks naked through a small town, looks at the people he meets, touches them, and changes their lives just with his gaze and touch. He performs miracles. It's a book full of sensuality, sexuality, without ever becoming vulgar. There's also social criticism, criticism of the obsolete and pernicious mentality that triumphs in the world."

Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) was an American writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Always with scarce commercial success, even though he was a screenwriter for the series Star Trek and two of his short stories were adapted for the iconic series The Twilight Zone, Sturgeon had a following of loyal readers and some renowned admirers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury. In 1986, a year after his death, the novel he had been working on for over a decade, Cosdiví, was published. "It's a delight. I laughed my heart out," assures Carré-Pons, who, from Cal Carré, "the artisanal and family publishing house" she founded in 2021, has published this summer a little delight by Mark Twain, The Million Pound Bank Note, and the 12th-century version – hitherto unpublished in Catalan – of The Romance of Tristan and Isolde, translated and annotated by Lola Badia.