"Thank you for inviting me. I know how you are with tourists. I appreciate you are not throwing anything at me," says the Englishwoman Sheena Patel as a joke to break the ice. We are at the presentation of her first novel, Soc fan, at La Central de Consell de Cent. The writer really knows how to deliver opening lines, because her novel's is: "I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as me." Bam. "I'd give anything for a joke," she'll confess later, which is another good streak.

Several novels by Zadie Smith (London, 1975), one of the most important writers in contemporary English literature, had been published in Catalan since her debut, White teethBut the vicissitudes of the publishing world (what gory novel wouldn't Smith herself write!) have condemned it to the unglamorous oblivion of secondhand bookstores, and thus the appearance ofThe fraud, her latest novel, splendidly translated by Marta Pera and published by the very young Jande publishing houseThis is great news. And we hope there will be many more to come, because Smith's novels are too good not to be part of the literary conversation among Catalan-language book readers.

Migrant mothers It is not only Fátima Saheb's debut collection of poems, but also the beginning of a cooperative publishing project, Jande, with which the young editors Aissata M'ballo Diao and Diana Rahmouni Audenis aim to discover new voices from here who are racialized or of migrant descent and also to incorporate translations of authors such as the climate activist Mikaela Loach.