Not long ago, the English writer Robert Macfarlane, a true authority on nature non-fiction, published a book titled Underland (Angle), in which he proposed the possibility, studied by him and by other writers and environmental activists, of treating the elements of nature as living beings and, therefore, opening an infinite field of new questions and possibilities: what should this treatment be like? Do they have rights and duties? Can we protect them with laws, as we do with vulnerable groups? They certainly have a birth, and a death, and they have been on Earth for several millennia, long before us as a species.

The Catalan Book Week is not satisfied with the 9,000 m² it occupies at the Passeig Lluís Companys in Barcelona until Sunday and is expanding into some activities outside the venue, such as the cocktail party celebrating the 50 years of La Magrana hosted at the Maritime Museum, with the presence of some of the authors who make up the current catalog of the label, such as Montse Virgili, David Moragas, Núria Perpinyà, Aina Gatnau, and M. Mercè Cuartiella. Also Cristina Genebat, winner of the first edition of the Lo Somni award with Sorra, who shortly before the start of the party could not find, like other authors from the house, which entrance to the museum to use. "Don't worry, sooner or later we will find the way," the novelist Aniol Florensa, whom she had just met, told her rightly, shortly before meeting a future author of the house, Paula Vidal, who will debut at La Magrana at the beginning of 2027.

The journalist Montse Virgili (Tarragona, 1976), presenter of the program Las mujeres y los días from Catalunya Ràdio, makes her literary debut with Los pajaritos (La Magrana), a novel about the women who have marked her. From the fishmonger who was missing half an arm and the pastry chef who gave her sweets for no reason to the almost illiterate grandmother who wrote in Spanish, Virgili crafts a narrative collage that precisely captures childhood in the 80s and is, at the same time, a strong tribute to the women silenced by the patriarchy.

Philologist and former member of the Congress of Deputies for En Comú Podemos, Mar García Puig (Barcelona, 1977) surprised a lot with his first book, The history of vertebrates –which received the Ciutat de Barcelona Award in the essay, humanities, and history categories–, where she openly shared her experience with the little-explored connection between motherhood and mental health. Two years later, the Barcelona-born author has captivated Marta Orriols with his second book, This is so scary, published, like its predecessor, by La Magrana.

I'm arriving in July feeling short on energy. It's been an intense year, and this week I wanted to write something light, something that wouldn't require too much emotional effort. But karma literary had other plans for me and it has come into my hands the latest novel by the Valencian writer Enric Pardo i Ramírez, The man of the house, published by La Magrana.

The visit of a clumsy and insistent encyclopedia salesman who ends up asking for the man of the house, even though there is no one in that home anymore, marks the beginning of the first novel by Enric Pardo (Castellón de la Plana, 1977) written in a rich and intimate Valencian. Broiled rice, Look what you've done and Lost faggot, Pardo has needed to reconstruct his childhood and remember how his obsession with fictional worlds – literary, cinematic and comics – was born in The man of the house (La Magrana, 2025), a naked, emotional and at times uncomfortable testimony about the difficult and defective construction of a child in the 1980s.

This is the last novel translated into Catalan by the winner of the last Nobel Prize for Literature, South Korean writer Han KangA book that relates to all of the author's books, but especially to Human acts, because it also delves—with as much force as delicacy—into the traumatic past of Korean history. In this case, the bloody episode at the heart of it all is a massacre that took place on Jeju Island, in the northernmost part of the country, in which more than ten thousand people were murdered. It was a true barbarity perpetrated by police and military personnel against a popular uprising of peasants who rejected the division of Korea into two countries. It was 1948, and some historians place this episode as one of the preludes to the Korean War, which began two years later. Needless to say, the entire massacre took place with the knowledge of the US Army, which already controlled the territory.