Description
Backstory pick
Translated from Catalan and originally published in 1980, Journeys and Flowers is a strange and surreal collection of interlinking short stories, full of magical realism. It's beautifully written and thought-provoking. Darby
A lone traveller with no endpoint in sight finds himself journeying through villages where the dead walk at solstice, silkworm-like women live in cocoons and a thousand men in gleaming armour play at being soldiers. Reality blurs, shimmers and darkens; unease grows.
Stories of invented flowers follow and allow Nature pickto bloom, vivid and intoxicating, to the fore. Absurd, lush and dreamlike, they capture different truths of humanity.
In this collection, inventive force and lyrical power come together in a poetic voice of indelible magnetism to create a beguiling, uncanny world – and confirm Mercè Rodoreda as one of the greatest Catalan writers of the twentieth century.