There is an underground path that connects All the Happy Houses (La Campana), the debut novel by Esperança Sierra Serra (Terrassa, 1974), with some of the author's own experiences. But what is fiction and what is truth in this story of four friends in their fifties is only known to the writer, who does not hide the need to narrate what she has observed. “I feel very committed to the women who live made up by the day-to-day, by commitments they established many years ago,” says Sierra. Crossing the 50-year-old threshold was, for some of her friends, the trigger against these “corsets that tighten them but that fit them well.” In the novel, Raquel, Sita, Helena, and Míriam represent four women of her generation who will experience a journey of liberation after becoming aware of wrong decisions.

At 35 years old, and thanks to the immediate success of the novel The God of Small Things (1996; in Catalan, by Amsterdam), the writer and activist Arundhati Roy (Shillong, 1961) achieved “financial independence”. Since then, her trajectory has continued with a single motto, which she lets out with a mischievous smile: “I do whatever I want”.

"I was born in a country, Peru, where there is very little consideration for animals, and where they are even mistreated, but for a little more than half of my life I have lived in a place where they are highly respected," comments the narrator Claudia Ulloa Donoso (Lima, 1979), who has just arrived from Trondheim, a city located in central Norway, to present her third collection of stories. The Terrible Fear of Being an Animal (Páginas de Espuma, 2026) conjugates the realities of the Latin American country where she grew up and became an adult and those of the European country where she works as a teacher and has consolidated her literary career. "I arrived in Norway for love, but I stayed to study sociology and education, and I haven't left since," she recalls.

Fans of Maggie O’Farrell have received the good news that at the beginning of the year –specifically, the first day of February– we will have a new novel by the Irish author: The Marriage Portrait. It has been translated into Catalan by Marc Rubió and will be published by L’Altra Editorial. It is a story set at the end of the 19th century, in an Irish corner far from everything, and inspired by the adventure experienced by the author’s great-grandfather, who worked mapping the island for the British army. Editors and critics speak of an overwhelming and moving narrative, and many claim that it is her best work.

Few novels published this year start with a premise as curious, risky, and fun as The Last Trace, by Maria Reva (Kherson, 1989), which Periscopi is now publishing in Catalan, translated by Míriam Cano. It begins as the story of the biologist Ieva's obsession with raising endangered snails. It continues with the day-to-day life of Romeo Meets Yulia, the mail-order bride company where Ieva works to fund her research into gastropod mollusks. Through two sisters the protagonist comes into contact with, Nastia and Solomia, she agrees to kidnap a group of single men to denounce the misogyny of the business and, in the process, discover who is hiding behind her mother's mysterious disappearance. In the middle of the adventure, moreover, the novel implodes and transforms into a totally different book.

The "unmistakable and original voice", the "creative freedom", the "constant dialogue with Latin American works of the literature of strangeness" and the "opening of paths to new generations of narrators" are four of the main reasons that Ernest Urtasun, Spanish Minister of Culture and Sports, gave this Tuesday evening on behalf of the jury to grant Cristina Fernández Cubas the Cervantes Prize 2026, endowed with 125,000 euros and intended for works in the Spanish language. Born in Arenys de Mar in 1945 and settled in Barcelona for decades, Fernández Cubas has been one of the pioneering narrators in including supernatural and inexplicable elements in her literary world, which began to unfold from 1980 with the publication of an emblematic collection of stories, Mi hermana Elba, at Tusquets, where she has presented the entirety of her work.

In times when I struggle to find good reads (good in the sense that they carry me away), there is a strategy that rarely fails. Try going to a trusted bookstore (in my case, Mitja Mosca, in Badalona) and, without rushing, stroll near the books while you chat with the bookseller, pick one up just because you are attracted to its cover, read the first page of another, let yourself be carried away by absurd intuitions rather than logical reasons (well-known author, respected publisher).

The entire first part of this novel is a false gateway: we read the story of a young couple who meet one day at church, get married, and go off to live in one of the idyllic suburbs where they will lead the life that every middle-class couple has dreamed of, with a little garden, children, and apple pies on Sunday afternoons. But this is a book by Chris Kraus (New York, 1955), one of the symbols of American counterculture, the author of I love Dick, a 1997 novel that is today considered one of the most important feminist novels, and therefore things cannot go on like this for long. There are signs for the attentive reader: the second daughter is born with a cognitive problem, the neighbors are more hostile than one would expect, and the father's jobs keep closing down. Suddenly, this grand overview focuses on a single character: Catherine, the eldest daughter, who will flee from this very uptight family as soon as she can. That is when the novel takes a leap, which will only be the first of many.

I wanted to write a chronicle of the presentation of Laetitia Colombani's new novel, Laetitia Colombani, A Day Without Women (La Magrana / Salamandra, 2026), without using the verb to braid. I try a few times and give up. It’s not that I’m in a hurry to pull the ace of The Braid out of my sleeve to hook you into the article, but I have to use the simile of weaving and braiding because the author returns to that structure with which she found success. Let me explain the success: Colombani published her first novel, The Braid, nearly ten years ago, which was an immediate global phenomenon and which, with 8 million copies sold in forty languages, changed her life.

For every award received Sala Augusta followed by Mother Tongue, the latest book by Sebastià Alzamora (Llucmajor, 1972), the Majorcan author has not stopped wondering about the reasons that had made it possible. "I think about it constantly, but I cannot quite explain it to myself," he admits with a smile, surrounded by the jury of the Lletra d'Or prize, one of the most veteran in the Catalan literary sector. It is the fifth recognition for a published work that Sala Augusta has received since Edicions Proa released it in May 2025. First came the Critics' Prize from the Spanish Association of Literary Critics. A few months later, it won the Josep Maria Llompart Prize, awarded by the Association of Catalan Language Writers of the Balearic Islands. It was followed by the Crítica Serra d'Or Prize for poetry and, weeks before the Lletra d'Or, was awarded the National Poetry Prize "for his ability to move, with identical brilliance, from the impassioned language of historical denunciation to the delicacy of the domestic space".

A year and a half ago, Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) left Argentina and settled in Launceston, on the north of the island of Tasmania. Before leaving the country where she had been born, raised, worked, and, finally, triumphed with novels like Nuestra parte de noche (Anagrama, 2019), Enriquez needed to take stock of the authors who had marked her throughout nearly four decades of obsessive reading. "While I was finishing that book, Archipiélago [Ampersand, 2025], my library was traveling by ship from Buenos Aires, and it could have been lost forever –she recalls now from Barcelona, with a new essay just published, Conversación con la oscuridad (Páginas de Espuma, 2026)–. For a few days, I fantasized about the idea of the shipwreck: it would have opened a period of inevitable mourning, but at the same time it would have forced me to start a new library from scratch".

I would not want in any way to be in the shoes of any of those authors who triumph with their first published book –I certainly do not dream of being resurrected like Carmen Laforet–, because the expectations generated are so high that it is very difficult not to fail. Although the success that the writer Alana S. Portero (Madrid, 1978) obtained with her first novel, La mala costumbre, was more than justified, now the publication of her second, Cosamala, puts her in a complicated position. Will the author validate her triumph or will she crash?

"Laura Galve's first novel unfolds with intelligence and audacity the story of a girl who tells us, in the first person, a piece of adolescence marked by her mother's abandonment and living with an alcohol-addicted father". With these words, Mariana Enriquez, president of the jury for the Diana Zaforteza award, endowed with 20,000 euros, presents the winning work of the third edition of the prize, Dime, niña bonita, which Galaxia Gutenberg will release on November 4th. Its author, Laura Galve (Barcelona, 1996), combined journalism and cultural communication before working as a literary scout. "Between one job and the other, I have been looking for gaps to write this story, and it has not been easy for me for two reasons: because I could not find the time and because of the book's subject matter," acknowledges Galve.

There are novels that feed on chilling real crimes and, by narrating them, bring them back to the table to show the horror the victims suffered. Cosamala (Seix Barral), by Alana S. Portero (Madrid, 1978), goes a little further, because it transcends denunciation through recreation and transformation, thanks to a prose of precise and unsettling beauty, of an episode of the Spanish Civil War experienced in Guillena, a municipality located about 20 km north of Seville. An episode that still shakes everyone who hears about it today, both for its brutality and for the chronological proximity of its discovery.

A few days ago, Sílvia Pérez Cruz, upon accepting the National Culture Award, ended her acceptance speech by saying that if we take care of culture, culture will take care of us. It seemed to me that I had heard her say it on some other occasion, and I found it very fitting: it is hard to think of anyone who can state it with such conviction, and at the same time with such meaning. One only needs to evoke one of Sílvia's songs, or any of her concerts, or even her way of speaking, moving, acting, to see that, certainly, she takes her craft as an act of caring. And of responsibility, too. Mireia Sallarès says this, that having an idea is having a responsibility, and I like how both ideas resonate together because, beyond the political thing or the social dimension of creation in terms of a manifesto or a claim, there is a political action in the gesture of writing (poems, songs, ideas, art...) that deals with a more delicate and sinuous political intention, I would say, more subtle and perhaps imperceptible, which is that of caring and that of having responsibility.

For several years now, Catalan readers have been able to savor the meticulous, introspective, and hallucinatory prose of Mircea Cartarescu (Bucharest, 1956). While Periscopi published Solenoid (2017) and the Blinding trilogy (2018-2022), novels translated by Antònia Escandell Tur, thanks to the Mallorcan publisher Lleonard Muntaner and translator Xavier Montoliu Pauli, the volumes of short stories Why We Love Women (2016), the poems of Nothing (2018), an extensive and essential anthology of his Diaries (2024) have arrived, and now, Travesti, which according to the Romanian author was "the beginning of everything that has come after." This short novel, published in Romanian in 1994, presents a 34-year-old writer who, with the desire to emerge from the crisis he finds himself in, recalls the summer of his adolescence spent in camps where contact with nature, music, and inquiries into his own sexuality changed his life.

At the end of September, a scandal occurred in France that has shaken the publishing and cultural world. The novel that was leading sales in the rentrée littéraire –most fiction narrative is published just upon returning from the summer holidays– seems not to have been written by its author, Thélyson Orélien, alone, but rather that it is due above all to artificial intelligence.

A Brilliant Thief, by Cristina Ros, has been the winning work of the El Vaixell de Vapor Award from Editorial Cruïlla, a cultural benchmark for children's and young adult literature in the Catalan language. The award for children's literature, endowed with 6,000 euros, was presented at the Mezza Salon of the Hotel Icon in Barcelona. For its part, the 2026 Gran Angular Award, intended for young adult literature and which this year celebrated its 36th edition, has been declared void.

I wonder what it is that I like so much about this narrator, one of my favorite writers. Not one of his books has ever disappointed me! It doesn't matter if you read one of his novels or a collection of short stories: the style is unmistakable (short, sharp, elegant sentences; very penetrating psychological observations, always subtle). But the style of Patrick Modiano is also unmistakable, and, for me, the Frenchman is of very little interest. Peter Stamm's narrative situations—the setting, the spaces in which the action or thought unfolds—are very attractive to me: but so are those devised by Jonathan Franzen and Eider Rodríguez, for instance, and to me, the books of these two authors, while quite remarkable, do not move me as much as those of the Swiss writer.