Ten great books for this Saint George's Day that you might not know

BarcelonaFor Sant Jordi, there is life beyond the best-selling books, publishing phenomena, and circumstantial trends. You just need to take a stroll through a well-run bookstore to verify that the good health of the Catalan publishing sector lies in the explosive diversity of proposals and in the quality and demand of many of these proposals. We choose just ten that we believe would be worth reaching more readers.

For almost three decades, Neus Canyelles (Palma, 1966) has built a literary work as intimate and subtle as it is powerful, drawing on autobiography when it wasn't yet a trend –Neu d'agost, her debut, dates from 1997– and which now focuses on a gallery of characters who wait, physically or symbolically, from a delicate present or evoking a troubled past. "I waited with anxiety to forget, but not my name nor my mother's features nor my daughter's eyes," admits the narrator of Electroxoc, one of the seventeen stories included in the volume. Sales d'espera arrives three years after another commendable work, Milady (Empúries, 2023), focused on the author's complex relationship with her mother, and which completed an involuntary trilogy that had begun with Les millors vacances de la meva vida (Empúries, 2019) and continued with Autobiografia autoritzada (Empúries, 2022).

A group of five teenage friends living in a housing estate in a small provincial town decides to enter an abandoned house: the experience will be the starting point of a nightmare that will change their lives. This is the premise that surfaces in the plot of La nit devastada. The new novel by Jean-Baptiste del Amo (Toulouse, 1981) starts with an explicit tribute to writers like Stephen King and filmmakers like Wes Craven to offer a horror story combined with a precise analysis of social inequalities, growing racism, and intolerance towards homosexuality in late 20th-century France.

So far, North American Deborah Eisenberg (Winnetka, 1945) has remained "in a cozy and quiet corner (...) of the many rooms of the House of Literature", assures Damià Alou in the prologue of Your Duck is My Duck, the author's first collection of stories to reach us in Catalan. A contemporary of short story writers yet to be discovered in our language such as Joy Williams, Ann Beattie, and Diane Williams, Deborah Eisenberg excels at portraying privileged yet lost characters, as is the case with the painter who recounts her stay at friends' beach house to overcome the creative and existential crisis she is dragging. "I'm moving through time at full speed, tied to a bomb, which is my life – we read in the story. Besides, it's starting to look like a photo-finish: whether I'll arrive first or the world. It's not so hard to figure out why I don't sleep. What I can't figure out is why others can sleep."

Although the trajectory of Shirley Ann Grau (New Orleans, 1929–Kenner, 2020) unfolded from the mid-20th century to the first decade of the 21st, it was with The Housekeepers that the narrator achieved her peak popularity thanks to the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. When she was called to communicate the news, Grau, who had slept little that night due to one of her four children, then still very young, thought a friend was playing a joke on her: "Yes, I've won the Pulitzer and I'm the new Queen of England," she replied, before hanging up the phone.

Unpublished until now in Catalan, The Housekeepers,explores the structural racism of American society through the seven generations of the Howland family. The moral awakening of Abigail, the last link in the lineage, is fragmented, late, and, above all, ambiguous. Grau's novel does not present a reassuring resolution, nor poetic justice, nor symbolic reconciliation. Racism is not defeated there because it is not an individual antagonist, but a structure that survives good intentions.

"In the near future, a woman digitizes her consciousness to edit her own memory": this is the starting point for Alicia Kopf's (Girona, 1982) return to the novel. The book takes a step forward in the formal experimentation initiated in Germà de gel (L'Altra, 2016) and fragmentarily reconstructs the protagonist's self through brief chapters that delve into the mechanisms of desire and memory. "Before all this, I wanted to write about love and I haven't found love – we read in the novel. Maybe I wanted to write it but not find it. No man I like says anything to me, and those who say things to me don't interest me. In the background, the constant doubt of whether clinging to unavailability is a protective mechanism: fear of intimacy".

"Perhaps we write to remember, but above all we remember to write," assures Stefanie Kremser (Düsseldorf, 1967) in her new book, the first written directly in Catalan by the author born in Germany, raised in Brazil, and a resident of Barcelona for over two decades. After "If This Street Were Mine" (Edicions de 1984, 2020; translated by Marina Bornas), a memoir in which, through the more than twenty homes she had lived in until then – in Europe, North America, and South America – Kremser questioned the "constant formation and reformation" of her identity, in this case, she starts from the recent and traumatic memory of having had to leave the apartment on Carrer Princesa where she lived with her husband, the also writer Jordi Puntí, to develop a reflection on the importance of having a place to live and taking care of it, be it modest or luxurious, and how a city like the Catalan capital makes it increasingly difficult for its inhabitants to stay there.

"In all of Naples only twelve ambulances remain. The others have been sent to Rome, where they are of no use. Poor Naples! Two bombings a day and no ambulances! –exclaims an engineer from the City Council to the narrator of La pelle–. There are thousands of dead today; those who have suffered the most, as always, are the working-class neighborhoods. And what can I do with twelve ambulances? We should have a thousand."

Helplessness and indignation are two of the sentiments that abound in one of the most controversial and striking books by Curzio Malaparte (Prato, 1898–Rome, 1957). Persecuted for a time in Italy, included in the Index of Forbidden Books by the Vatican in 1950, La pelle (1949) bears direct testimony to the occupation or liberation of Italy by the Allies (1943), an event that the author himself experienced as a liaison officer for the Italian army with the American troops, accompanying them from Naples to Rome. It is a great precedent for the non-fiction novel, which has subsequently been cultivated by authors such as Truman Capote, Emmanuel Carrère, and Javier Cercas.

In addition to the new books by Feliu Formosa and Jaume Coll Mariné, the publication of two unpublished works by Blai Bonet to mark the centenary of his birth –Oh Calvary, Calvary and El jove (1971)– and an anthology by Jordi Llavina, this spring, the return to poetry of Biel Mesquida (Castelló de la Plana, 1947) deserves special attention. The latest Premi d'Honor is one of the most unique and radical authors in Catalan literature: a pioneer of textualism (L'adolescent de sal) and queer literature (El bell país on els homes desitgen els homes), Mesquida has combined avant-garde and local colour, political commitment and aversion to convention in about twenty novels, short story collections – such as the cycle begun with Tots els detalls del món (Empúries, 2005) and which currently reaches Encarnacions (LaBreu, 2022)–, plays and poetry collections. Trast reflects on the passage of time in poems divided into various sections, such as Hors-Champ: Sensitive Content, where one can read: "At my window life escapes / like mercury balls through my fingers / What was once a palace of light / of LEDs of flashes of spotlights / is now skin of dead shadows / where so much low-cost waste / fertilizes a bouquet of roses / that the darkness transfigures".

In 2026, it should be an important year for Dolors Miquel (Lleida, 1960). She has just won the Jaume Fuster prize for her career, shortly after reissuing El musot (Documents Documenta), presenting the Spanish translation of Mata'm psicosi (Temporal), and publishing one of the peaks of her work, El pit adormit. In almost 500 pages of impressive intensity and ambition, Miquel combines several narrative threads, such as the detection and evolution of the cancer that was diagnosed five years ago, the chronicle of how Catalan poetry was reborn in the late nineties thanks to an alternative circuit of recitals, reflections on misogyny – that of the past and that of the present – and fragments in which family memories are intertwined with a passion for reading and writing.

The literature of Mercè Rodoreda continues to demonstrate its strength and relevance through exhibitions – like the one still on view at the CCCB –, reissues of her work and translations, in some cases controversial, like the latest of La mort i la primavera, which includes a cover and afterword by David Uclés. Also through the irony used by the narrator's voice in one of the year's most notable debuts, Amèlia de les Camèlies, by Etna Miró (Barcelona, 2001).

The young and dilettante students of philology, literature, and political science in the novel can spend an entire afternoon debating whether Colometa likes oranges or not, and how to associate the roundness of this fruit "with femininity, as opposed to vertical and phallic forms". The idolatry of Rodoreda leads them to "intellectual claustrophobia" and contributes to immobilizing their intellectual and vital progression, also violated by the excessive cult of the self and appearances. The book details the rise and fall of Amèlia, a girl who is incapable of distinguishing between reality and fiction, just like Don Quixote or Emma Bovary, but without reaching the hallucinations of the former and without receiving as severe a punishment as Flaubert's character.