The return of summer comes strong, with Catalan Book Week (September 8 to 17) as a great spur, and some publishing bets land in bookstores already at the end of August. This year, in addition, some of the most prominent novelties are story books. This is the case, for example, of the new collections of short narratives by Sergi Pàmies, Carlota Gurt or Damià Bardera, but also of premieres such as Roser Vernet, with one foot in the landscape of the Priorat and the other in subtle fiction, or Joan Enric Barceló.
There will also be novels such as those by Marta Marín-Dòmine, winner of the Sant Joan BBVA award; a new inquiry by Lolita Bosch about her family; historical novels by Xavier Theros or Núria Cadenes, the return of Iolanda Batallé or a memoir by Raimon.
And a find: the first novel, still unpublished, by Maria Antònia Oliver.
In his new book of stories, Pàmies builds a literary artifact that gathers doses of fiction and non-fiction. Anecdotes from childhood and youth, past and recent trips, either as stories or as chronicles – even imagined – to try to find the meaning of time. August 30
After having caught readers first with the stories of Cavalcarem alle nite and the novel Sola, which he wrote at the same time, Gurt returns to the short story with a collection that investigates one’s own identity and partner relationships. August 30
Activist for the Priory and always with one foot in literature, Roser Vernet’s first literary book collects a set of prose on the borderline between essay and short story, vindication of an elemental landscape – earth, water, air and fire – and also linguistic. August 30
After the surprise of her first novel, Fugir was the most beautiful we had (Club Editor, 2019), in which she dialogued with paternal memory, the current director of the Born Center for Culture and Memory portrays a complex relationship daughter-mother and which is based on her own. The novel, which won the BBVA Sant Joan award, claims acceptance, but also oblivion. August 30
Gris has just gotten divorced, and her father is dead, she’s unemployed and adrift, and she’s trying to get out by reversing the journey her grandfather took in 1939. So she returns from Mexico to Catalonia, where he will stop at the landscapes painted by Dalí. September 4
The member of Els Amics de les Arts makes his debut in written literature with this collection of stories, sometimes linked, which promises to explore the small frustrations we accumulate during our day-to-day life in a book full of irony. September 4
In addition to being a writer, Masó is a musician and he shows it in every book. Here, he signs an epistolary novel inspired by the form of the chacona – an instrumental piece with variations on an obstinate bass – a whole experiment of style based on a woman who, the day after burying her husband, finds between the things of him a love letter. September 6
Márquez’s new novel inaugurates the Catalan narrative collection by Alrevés – after Crims.cat moved to the new Clandestina -, an advertising creative from Barcelona, ??past the golden age of the eighties, the first crisis of the 1990s and the final one in 2008, it’s hard to get ahead as you can in a precarious working world when you’re already over fifty years old. A generation that seemed to have it all until the house of cards came tumbling down. September 4
After the great success of his debut with Gina, Climent has written a novel in which a mother – with a family secret that will eventually be revealed and shake everything up – and her two daughters, each with a different temperament and at different times in their lives, they are reunited after years apart, in a story narrated in the author’s characteristic ebrenc. September 6
Increasingly important is Picasso’s stay – with Fernande Olivier – in Gósol in 1906, to which Rubio dedicates a narrative book in which he shows us how the artist overcomes an artistic blockage and, transmuted into Pau de Gósol, begins the pictorial journey that will take him until Cubism. September 6
Ten years after the previous novel, Batallé takes us to a mountain town where a writer takes refuge to write again and have a bad trance. From there she writes the voices and confessions of the inhabitants of a recovered town and who wants to talk, among other things, about the healing power of literature and the price of being a woman in any society, but even more so in the countryside, without forgetting the transformation of the Pyrenees. September 6
The Roc Boronat prize-winning novel presents a satire of our world in which nothing is as it seems and which aims to warn about the dangers of idolatry and delusions of transcendence through humorous science fiction in the style of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. September 4
Based on the experience of a photographer who, during an assignment, has to stay more days than planned in Menorca, where, out of season, she will face herself in an introspective process from which she will come out renewed. September 6
A collection of ten fantastic stories – with subgenres such as space opera or pulp adventures – around duality, to the point that each story is written by four hands: Ricard Ruiz Garzón and Inés Macpherson, Roser Cabré-Verdiell and Víctor Garcia Tur, Marc Pastor and Isabel del Río, Albert Villaró and Jaume Valor, Ivan Ledesma and Quim Gómez, Mar Bosch and Adrià Pujol, Alícia Gili and Edgar Cotes, M. Mercè Cuartiella and Joan Manuel Soldevilla, Elena Bartomeu and Laura Tomàs, and Enric Herce and Héctor Rivadeneyra Moll. September 12
During the 1980s, the singer-songwriter from Xàtiva kept a diary, from which he has made a selection and review that gives shape to a book between experiences, readings or travels in intense years of political agitation and also disenchantment. September 20
Bosch has written several novels about his family – the latest, The truth is not written. A novel from Barcelona, ??published less than a year ago – returns with a tribute to his grandmother based on the memories that her garden evokes in him, which he defines as a “spoken garden”. September 20
Cadenes’ new bet moves away from Guillem’s non-fiction and collective projects such as Matar el monstre – based on Frankenstein – or Temps obert – following in Pedrolo’s footsteps – to delve into history and recreate the lavish Rome of Emperor Tiberius and reflect how absolute power corrals people from within. October 4
If in La fada negra (Destino, 2017) he set the action in the Barcelona of 1843, his return to the historical thriller begins only five years later with a series of crimes in Ripollès by a guerrilla party led by the captain Lampades – the protagonist of the previous one, yes -. A plot that will also travel to the Catalan capital that the co-founder of Accidents Polipoétics knows perfectly well. October 5
Barely a year after the collection Beasts of companionship -Godall Edicions-, Bardera presents a new book of stories. If then the volume focused on the work and educational sphere, this time, as the title suggests, it explores the territory between the short story and the theater – even theatrical sketches that are impossible to represent – without renouncing its own universe. October 30
To finish this short selection of novelties for autumn – to which could be added the new books of, for example, Jordi de Manuel, Assumpta Montellà, Elisabet Riera, Jordi Sierra i Fabra, Marc Masdeu, Sílvia Cantos or Bea Cabezas, as well as the first novels by Carlota Benet, Òmnia l’Bakkali or Àngels Dalmau, but also the incorporation of Joan Ramis’s theater into the Imprescindibles de Barcino collection – we highlight the publication of an unpublished novel by Maria Antònia Oliver, the first to write. It is an epistolary narrative based on the letters that the writer sent to her partner, Jaume Fuster, when he was exiled to Cabrera: a love story with emotions, longing and the rage of separation during the gray years sixty October 19
