Death in Spring

Soaringly beautiful, urgent and disturbing... A masterpiece

Soaringly beautiful, urgent and disturbing... A masterpiece

Mercè Rodoreda's artistry is of the highest order

Dark and beautiful and brilliant

Rodoreda has bedazzled me

Read it for its beauty, for the way it will surprise and subvert your desires, and as a testament to the human spirit in the face of brutality and willful inhumanity

Utterly extraordinary - I have had few reading experiences like it - it's as if one is unravelling a terrible yet irresistible secret , the secret of death

The greatest contemporary Catalan novelist and possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho

A heartbreaking, unforgettable read. One of the most important literary works from the second half of the 20th century

It is a total mystery to me why [Rodoreda] isn't widely worshipped . . . . She's on my list of authors whose works I intend to have read all of before I die. Tremendous, tremendous writer

One of the most radical works from the past century

Mercè Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1908. During the Spanish Civil War she was exiled to France and later Switzerland. Rodoreda was only able to return to Barcelona in the mid-1960s, where she wrote several prize-winning novels in Catalan, including Death in Spring, which was inspired by her experience of Franco's dictatorship. Rodoreda died in 1983, a few years before Death in Spring's first publication, and is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century.