Even with the memory of having lived "the unforgettable experience" of her first Sant Jordi, Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir (Reykjavik, 1958) strolls through the garden of Club Editor, the publishing house that has already published three of her unclassifiable novels, where an unwavering faith in the human race shines. Accustomed to the volcanic landscape of Iceland, Ólafsdóttir cannot help but marvel at the ease with which trees and flowers of all kinds grow in southern Europe, the setting of her best-known novel, Rosa candida –available in some thirty languages–, until now unpublished in Catalan, translated by Macià Riutort, as well as La veritat sobre la llum and Edèn, with which she won the Llibreter prize 2025.

Sant Jordi has once again overflowed Catalonia with the magic formula that never fails: books for all tastes —from the exquisite Nobel laureate Han Kang to young authors in love with success, such as Gil Pratsobrerroca, David Uclés and Inma Rubiales—, roses at prices ranging from 4 to 25 euros, and the contagious enthusiasm of millions of citizens who have taken to the streets ready to have a good time.

For Ali Smith, reading is so important and has shaped her in such a decisive way that this Wednesday afternoon she stated, in a packed Saló de Cent of Barcelona City Hall: "Books and libraries have a relationship and significance similar to what we humans have with water. I know that three-quarters of my body is water. I suspect that three-quarters of my body is also made of books".

The dragon is one of the quintessential fantastic animals in the history of literature. Its power has fascinated millions of readers, young and old, spurred by the creativity of novelists and poets from all over, but the image it presents has been changing: the dragon can be menacing, dangerous, and violent, although also, on some occasions, benign and compassionate, and can even possess a wisdom superior to that of humans. "I am fire. I am death," proclaims Smaug, the imposing and fearsome dragon with whom Bilbo Baggins must verbally contend in The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. "Never give up, and sooner or later you will find good luck," recommends Fuixur, the majestic white dragon, to the intrepid Atreyu in The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende. For Ursula K. Le Guin, who expanded and renewed the abilities of these enigmatic animals in the Earthsea novel cycle, dragons represent the human capacity to imagine: "If dragons frighten us it is because we tend to consider the works of imagination as suspicious or even despicable," the author defended in the article Why, as Americans, are we afraid of dragons? (1974).

The Catalan Book Chamber published this Monday the list of best-selling books in the week before Sant Jordi in fiction, non-fiction, and children's and young adult books, both in Catalan and Spanish. As usual, new releases are climbing to the top positions.

Can we live with our dead present without them tormenting us, especially considering that some as significant as the older sister or father have committed suicide? This is one of the driving questions of A Truce That Is Not Peace, the new book by Miriam Toews (Steinbach, 1964), published in Catalan by Les Hores, translated by Octavi Gil Pujol. In the hands of many writers, the autobiographical material she unfolds would be mired in the swamp of traumas. The Canadian author, however, knows how to combine sadness and longing with a surprising sense of humor. She can just as easily rescue an anecdote from the Mennonite Christian community where she grew up as recall a funny family episode from the past – such as the robbery in Ecuador –, mention a book that has recently interested her, and draw the reader into her current reality: the author has had a small house built on the property where her mother, one of her daughters, her partner, and their two children live.

For 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.

It so happens that, with a few weeks' difference, two of the great architects of the Tusquets publishing house have died. First was the poet and professor Antoni Marí (1944-2026), who besides being an in-house author had directed the Catalan collection, L'Ull de Vidre, and the poetry collection, Nuevos Textos Sagrados, and this Friday it was its founder and literary director for decades, Beatriz de Moura, according to the publishing house, which said goodbye to her remembering her as "a brilliant and unprejudiced woman, cosmopolitan and feisty, a precursor of so many things and the soul of the publishing house".

When Transbordo en Moscú, the last volume of Las tres leyes del movimiento, Eduardo Mendoza (Barcelona, 1943) thought it was time to retire. "The best thing I could do was retire, because I had already written everything I wanted to –he recalls at Casa del Libro in Barcelona–. Then I started to get bored and thought I would do something else without forgetting that I was in injury time." That was five years ago and, since then, Mendoza has published Tres enigmas para la Organización (2024) and, just this week, La intriga del funeral inconveniente, both published by Seix Barral, like the rest of his work. "Eduardo has often considered stopping writing and has even announced it, but we are lucky that he has done the opposite afterwards –admits Elena Ramírez, his editor–. Last year was very hectic for him, with everything that the Princess of Asturias Award and several trips entailed, including the Guadalajara Book Fair. Nothing suggested he was working on a new novel".

In a slightly more just world, the jury of the award to which Dolors Miquel (Lleida, 1960) submitted El pit adormit at the end of 2024 would have proclaimed her book as the winner. It didn't happen that way, but the work has finally seen the light of day: in almost 500 pages of impressive intensity and ambition, the poet –author of some twenty volumes, including Haikús del camioner (Empúries, 1999) and El guant de plàstic rosa (Edicions 62, 2016)– combines various 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 readings, reflections on misogyny – that of the past and that of the present – and fragments in which family memories intertwine with a passion for reading and writing.

John Irving (New Hampshire, 1942) has been a writer much loved by Catalan readers for decades. Although he has just turned 84, he has no intention of retiring: Reina Esther (Edicions 62/Tusquets; Catalan translation by Ernest Riera) has just arrived in bookstores, a novel that revisits one of the most emblematic settings of his fiction, the St. Cloud's orphanage where The Cider House Rules (1985) took place. It is there, at the beginning of the 20th century, that a surly girl of Jewish origin, Esther Nacht, arrives. Readers will accompany her on her long life journey, which begins in Vienna, continues in the American state of Maine and, after passing through Europe again, ends in Israel in the early eighties.

The one million euros of the first Aena Award for Hispano-American Narrative has finally gone to the book of disturbing and dystopian short stories, El buen mal, by the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin, published by Seix Barral. The award, better endowed than the Nobel Prize in Literature and matching the Planeta Prize, was the icing on the cake of a gala as lavish as it was extravagant, held at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona with five live performances based on each finalist book and with most attendees dressed in "relaxed elegance," as requested on the invitation.

"Stories have memory, and if no one takes care of them, they die", proclaimed, at the entrance of the Sant Pau Modernist Site, the guide who would accompany the sixty or so chosen ones – readers, influencers and journalists – to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, one of the most emblematic settings of The Shadow of the Wind, the novel with which Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964-2020) conquered the world 25 years ago.

A group of five adolescent friends living in a housing development in a small French 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 floats on the surface of the plot of La nit devastada, the first novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Toulouse, 1981) that we can read in Catalan thanks to the translation by Oriol Vaqué for Proa. Behind this horror premise lie family conflicts, abuse, and disappointments, but also the discovery of desire and the strength of friendship. After establishing himself before the age of 30 thanks to Una educación libertina (2008) and La sal (2010), both in Spanish published by Cabaret Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo once again focuses on the chiaroscuro of intimacy and social inequalities through a powerful story that pays homage to writers like Stephen King and filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven with a powerful, rich, and sensory literary style.

The "rural and polygonal" Basque Country of the 90s is resurrected in Pleibac, the second novel by Miren Amuriza (Berriz, 1990) which Pau Joan Hernàndez has translated into Catalan for Club Editor with grace and skill, to which he has added the transgressive linguistic vocation of the original. The book tells the story of friendship and betrayal between two adolescents, Jone and Polly, who grow up in the same Biscayan municipality where the author followed the family tradition of singing improvised verses in Basque. Years after establishing herself as a bertsolari and publishing several poetry collections, Amuriza tried her hand at prose in Basa (Elkar, 2019; in Spanish by Consonni), and now repeats the experience with a novel that flows down like a fresh beer after a party with friends.

The passage of time has not diminished the shyness of Jean Echenoz, but it has not managed to turn him into a cynical or disenchanted author. Born in Orange in 1947, the French writer has been one of the headliners of this year's Mot festival, but before that he passed through Barcelona with a new book in hand. Bristol (Raig Verd, 2026; translation by Anna Casassas) narrates decisive months in the life of Robert Bristol, a film director who is finishing the shoot of his latest film. It features effervescent, established, and semi-retired actresses, a solicitous but inconstant lover, an inspired policeman, a blackmailing general from South Africa, a bestselling author living in a palace, and a long list of supporting characters, human and animal, who further expand Echenoz's universe. The usual taste for details, the author's undeniable skill, and a sense of humor more subtle than our times make Bristol a pleasant and recommendable reading experience.

Italian music has just lost one of its most outstanding, prolific, and veteran voices, that of Gino Paoli, who died at the age of 91 in Genoa, the city where he had lived for decades. The long career of the musician and singer-songwriter, born on September 23, 1934, in Monfalcone—in the Friuli region—began in the late 1950s with a simple, elegant, and autobiographical song. The cat

"Writing a chronicle should be an act of freedom," Empar Moliner said towards the end of the presentation of his new novel, Instructions for living without her (Column, 2026), to the readers who listened to her with devotion this Monday evening at the Finestres bookstore. Among the audience were a man who bore a striking resemblance to Michel Houellebecq—one of Moliner's favorite authors—a former director of TV3, a handful of journalism students, and someone who exuded an intense stench of tobacco, camouflaged by the perhaps even more pervasive fragrance of chewing gum.

"Literary genres don't exist. For me, either there is literature or there isn't. We know what painting, architecture, sculpture, and music are—things change after John Cage—but it's not the same with literature. What is literature, and where do we find it? I can recognize it immediately: literature. I find it very evocative: literature. It excites me." Antoni Marí I used these words in 2012 to introduce Book of Absences (Tusquets), a magnificent example of the cultivated, demanding, and dazzling literary endeavor of the author born in Ibiza in 1944, who died in Barcelona at the age of 81. Shortly afterward, he added: "Literature is about fixing and dispelling the darkness."

Fish, the fifth novel that Eva Baltasar (Barcelona, ​​1978), published by Club Editor, tells the passionate yet destructive love story of two women. The first is a writer who narrates her journey of fascination, anguish, fear, and escape from her lover. The second, named Victoria, sells paper cones of fish at street markets and lives in a house reminiscent of those Gothic mansions where anything is possible. Translated into some twenty languages ​​and a Booker Prize finalist with BoulderBaltasar is one of the most internationally renowned authors of Catalan literature. Fish It confirms, once again, the singularity, power, and lyricism of his proposal.