A mesmerising and enigmatic collection of short stories, haunted by the horrors of war, and divided into two parts: journeys and flowers.
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 to 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.
‘These vignettes are planted thick with charm and eccentricity; but there is also a persistent seam of melancholy, and violence frequent erupts.’ TLS
‘Rodoreda has bedazzled me by the sensuality with which she reveals things within the atmosphere of her novels.’ Gabriel García Márquez
‘Rodoreda’s stories are a collection of snowglobes, frozen and beautiful.’ The Skinny
‘Rodoreda’s prose . . . is bold and beautiful.’ Jesmyn Ward
‘Rodoreda’s writing pays such fierce and tender attention to the experience of being alive, and the tempest that ordinary life can be.’ Helen Oyeyemi
‘The stories or vignettes or prose-poems that make up Mercè Rodoreda’s Journeys and Flowers each operate with their own peculiar but perfect logic which is exactly the logic of dreams . . . not just the logic of dreams but their crisp and bleached reality.’ Thom Eagle
‘Spare of words, these gorgeous, hypnotic vignettes contain whole worlds of sorrow and joy.’ Daily Mail
‘Mercè Rodoreda’s artistry is of the highest order.’ Diana Athill
‘The un-self-conscious beauty and the phantasmagoric pain in her work add up to a kind of sharp, transportive pleasure.’ Jia Tolentino
‘A lightning strike of a book that leaves behind a drift of violet smoke and a scent of sulphur and mimosa.’ David Hayden
‘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.’ John Darnielle
‘Rodoreda plumbs a sadness that reaches beyond historic circumstances . . . an almost voluptuous vulnerability.’ Natasha Wimmer
