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.

If one day, by chance, I happen to be on the subway with Màrius Serra (Barcelona, ​​1963), it's very likely that he has a notebook open in his hands and is writing frenetically. Don't even think about interrupting his creative flow: you could break the torrent of words that has ended up shaping a monumental novel like The misunderstanding (Proa, 2026). "A half-hour subway ride can be very productive," he says. "On a commuter train, the result can be spectacular. I like to practice writing on the move mainly for two reasons: first, because I'm away from my usual workplace; second, because I'm writing by hand, and I'm aware that what I'm doing is a first draft, something that gives me..."

Blanca Busquets (Barcelona, ​​​​1961) proposes to Shared rooms A seemingly unassuming novel that operates with considerable emotional ambition: to explore what happens when lives and wounds overlap in intimate, physical, and symbolic spaces. The title is not merely a scenic reference, but a poetic and moral statement: sharing a room means acknowledging the presence of the other, but also exposing oneself, negotiating silences, and redefining boundaries. In fact, there are two rooms that play a central role on the trauma ward of the hospital where the story unfolds: 271, where Montserrat is, and 269, where Riqui lies. At first, when they pass each other in the corridor, they both think they know each other, but they can't place them. The mystery is set, and at this point, the novel takes on a subtle, almost comical, edge. thriller.

"I know better what it costs to get on a tractor than to go up or down the subway stairs," he admits. Antoni PladevallBorn in Taradell in 1961, the author has continually explored "the psychology of characters who live surrounded by land, trees and irrigation ditches" in novels such as Rental properties (Column, 2006) and The black butterfly (Column, 2009). "From a young age, I was aware that I was just another figure in the landscape, and that the landscape, besides looking at me, was also looking at me," he recalls. A Doctor of Classical Philology, Pladevall was a high school teacher until four years ago. "I started in Berga, then moved to Torelló and Sabadell, and ended up in Vic," he says. "At one point, I could have taught in Taradell, but I resisted because I didn't want to run into a student's mother while I was queuing to buy bread, reproaching me for having failed her daughter."

"I suffered a perfectly planned mutilation, that of my language, and that's why I speak and write without any problem in Spanish. I don't regret mastering this language, but I can't ignore why I master it. If I write in Catalan, it's because I learned it on my own; nobody ever taught me; what's more, nobody ever speaks to me." With such forceful words—behind which one can sense long prior reflections—he expresses himself from time to time. Pedro Rovira (Vila-seca de Solcina, 1947) in his last and highly recommended diary, Life and Illusions (Proa, 2025). "If I had to bite my tongue in a book like this, I'd be better off not having written it," acknowledges the author, who has dedicated the last fifteen years, the most prolific of his career, to a threefold activity: that of making memories—through the cycle of diaries, inaugurated with Vermeer's Window (Proa, 2016) – that of continuing to cultivate poetry – with volumes such as The game of Venus (Proa, 2021)—and that of translating, with such outstanding projects as the one of The Flowers of Evil, of Charles Baudelaire (Proa, 2021).

Joan Baptista Peset Aleixandre was a prestigious Valencian doctor, professor of legal medicine and rector of the University of Valencia, shot by the Franco regime in May 1941. He came from a brilliant liberal lineage of Valencian doctors and intellectuals (his father was one of the honorary presidents of the First Congress of Doctors, Popular Front in the 1936 elections, integrated into the party of Manuel Azaña, Republican Left).

The starting point of Who saves a life, with which Núria Cadenas (Barcelona, ​​1970) has won the latest Proa Novel Prize. Her novel tells the true story of an escape network for Allied airmen, Jews, and Nazi fugitives in the Cerdanya region, in which the author's great-uncle, Joan Domènech, participated. Through the reconstruction of this relative's joys and suffering, Cadenas weaves a multifaceted narrative, recounting how some of the losers of the Spanish Civil War were able to collaborate in heroic actions that, nevertheless, had to be kept secret to avoid repression by the Franco regime.

Twenty-five years after his debut as a novelist with Postcard from Krypton, Jordi Cabré (Barcelona, ​​1973) publishes the reflective and delicate You with the night (Proa, 2025). The book's starting point is the transformative weeks the author spent at the Ledig House residency in the fall of 2022. Cabré, who previously He has won awards such as the Sant Jordi (Make a wish; Univers, 2019) and the City of Palma (The sadness virus(Proa, 2006), this time draws on autofiction to convey to readers the uncertainties and certainties of a man approaching fifty four years after his separation.

Over the past decade, Vicente Villatoro (Terrassa, 1957) has expressed his creativity like never before in his career. In addition to publishing an ambitious narrative trio on identity – which concluded with The grandparents' house (Proa, 2021)–, has written essays such as Too Much Fire: Extremely Apocryphal Dialogues between Savonarola and Machiavelli (Pórtico, 2018) and has made known Sant Llorenç del Munt: a biography (Symbol, 2025), a personal and collective journey through the massif located between the Vallès Occidental and Bages regions.

The time in which the action takes place Polish, Vicenç Villatoro's return to fictional novels (Terrassa, 1957) after four very notable books focused on personal, family, and community memory, is decisive. It's January 1992, in the midst of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a generator of uncertainty, speculation, and geopolitical disorder at all levels. We are, moreover, in Warsaw, the capital of the ever-punished Poland, a border space—more uncertainty, more speculation, more disorder—between the capitalist bloc and the Soviet bloc. To further unravel the skein, we follow the steps of a widowed, now-retired Israeli spy who has been reactivated to carry out one last mission: to participate in a purchase and sale operation of unknown war material between unknown sellers (former KGB agents).

The protagonist of the new novel by Gemma Ruiz Palà (Sabadell, 1975) is a woman who, after half a lifetime of conforming to the rules, decides that from then on she will do what she wants: she leaves home, her children turn their backs on her, she returns to her vocation as a sculptor and goes to Venice, invited by the Art Biennial. "I have written the Hollywood protagonist that I have missed in films," she acknowledged this Monday during the review of the editorial course by Grup 62. "We have learned to do many things through cinema, but something that it has not taught us, at least not women, is to learn to age." Gemma Ruiz Palà has recalled that patriarchy "puts an expiration date on women" and that it erases them after a certain age, as they have expressed, during the years of writingA woman your age –which Proa will publish at the beginning of October–, "great actresses like Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Halle Berry and Emma Vilarasau".

"It will be a decent novel, which is the saddest thing a novel can be," thinks one of the three protagonists of this story. I don't think this is the saddest thing that can be said about a novel, considering that we can dedicate the most insulting comments to it. But I understand what the narrator wants to express: by summing up the spirit of a book with the adjective correct We are sparing his life (in reality, we are concluding that this is a dispensable work). Many pages earlier, that same character, Miquel Rovira, awaits the trial of his rival, Ramón Balaguer (Ramón with an accent, a Catalan writer with a Castilian expression), about his latest novel, still unpublished.

Carlos Casajuana (Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1954) is one of the most subtly ironic novelists on the contemporary Catalan literary scene. Whether revisiting emblematic episodes such as Josep Carner's last trip to Catalonia (Return, 2017), of thrillers in which the business and political worlds are gracefully intertwined (A minor scandal, 2011), or daring to raise a farce about corruption within Barcelona City Council (The Devil's Pomps, 2019), the writer and retired diplomat – he has been ambassador to Greece, Malaysia, Vietnam and the United Kingdom – has built a prestigious career rewarded with awards such as the Ramon Llull, which he received in 2009 thanks to The last man who spoke Catalan. In The war within the war (Proa, 2025) revives the characters of the two Barcelona writers from that novel. Miquel Rovira is finishing a novel about the Civil War. The other, Ramón Balaguer, makes a living teaching in a literary workshop. They end up reuniting after making their differences in literature, politics, and love evident.

Amadeu Fabregat was, in the 1970s, a pioneer of Catalan literature in the Valencian Community. Two of his titles are legendary: Fresh Meat: Young Valencian Poetry and the novel –or whatever it was– Rehearsal for the approach to "Fallas Folles Fetes Foc"With these two depth charges—especially the second, which won the Andròmina de Octubre Prize—Fabregat made a name for himself in Valencia at the end of the Franco regime, where all aesthetic daring, all political extremism, and all cultural snobbery were lavishly celebrated.

The title I have given to this article includes the phrase "time ago", which was the title of Ramon Solsona's magnificent novel published in 2022 –for me, one of the most consistent Catalan novels of recent decades. A series of unfortunate circumstances meant that this prodigious work didn't receive the recognition it deserved.

There are loves capable of shaking the foundations of those who experience them thanks to their "bloodthirsty, revolutionary, and erotic" dimension. So pretty and tyrannical (Bow), with what Blanca Luz Vidal (Barcelona, ​​​​1986) has won the latest Carles Riba Prize, delves into a turbulent and difficult period, in which the liberating desire ends up poisoning the voice, as powerful as it is anguished, that conveys the poems. The book coincides on the new release counters with the recovery of Maripasoula, a trip to French Guiana that the author made more than a decade ago: published by Tushita for the first time in 2015, she is now putting it back into circulation –and rightly so– Editor Club. This light-filled adventure contrasts with the dense, twisted texts of the author's latest book.