Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize
Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname “Boulder.” When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn’t know how to say no―and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien.
With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.
Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her preeminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world―and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.
“A powerful and very original author. I would love to adapt Boulder.” —Pedro Almodóvar
“Over the holidays, I gifted the lapsed readers in my life three novels—all short, recent (allowing my malingering readers to justify them as a kind of “news,” which, of course, they are), and, most important, irresistible [...] Eva Baltasar’s Boulder, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, is the most recent of the three—a ragged, sensuous story. Here you will meet a gorgeously untethered woman wondering just what to do with her freedom. A book about new life for a new year.” —Parul Seghal, New Yorker
“The book is a modern love story – global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies – but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother. A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty and grace found within a family.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“[T]his slim, visceral novel power gains power from its subversive blurring of maternal intuition and its queering of parenthood.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“Boulder is a sensuous, sexy, intense book. Baltasar condenses the sensations and experiences of a dozen more ordinary novels into just over one hundred pages of exhilarating prose. An incisive story of queer love and motherhood that slices open the dilemmas of exchanging independence for intimacy.” —International Booker Prize judging panel
“Through such intricate writing, in Julia Sanches’s voraciously readable translation, the author deftly manages to elevate the idea of a relationship to a force of nature, with the character of Boulder representing the struggle to reconcile a desire to be alone with a desire for company.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Amid sexual trysts and growing tensions, Boulder searches for the mysterious sweet spot between her wants: freedom and connection. Baltasar has an innate talent for stretching the complexities of queer lives and predicaments into undulating adventure and tension.” —The Face
“In barely 100 pages, Catalan author and acclaimed poet Eva Baltasar has crafted a gem of a novella: sharp-edged, uncompromising and utterly compelling … Boulder is for everyone: a hard-hitting, incisive triumph.” —New Internationalist
“[T]he language of desire never stops vibrating off the page; Baltasar pans the mundane for gold, and offers those nuggets—these morsels of intimacy—in a way that grips and sates.” —New York Times Book Review
“Eva Baltasar’s Boulder deftly demonstrates fiction’s ability to elide the passage of time. . . . a thoroughly compelling work.” —Words Without Borders Watchlist
“[T]his slim, visceral novel power gains power from its subversive blurring of maternal intuition and its queering of parenthood.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“The book is a modern love story—global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies—but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother. A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty and grace found within a family.” —Kirkus Starred Review
“Exquisite, dark and unconventional, Eva Baltasar turns intimacy into a wild adventure.” —Fernanda Melchor
“Boulder’s action spans more than eight years, but the reader never feels the passage of that time . . . Everything here has an air of immediacy, yet at the same time one has the feeling that there are abysses yawning between every short sentence, ellipses that expand and beg to be filled in by the reader’s own imagination. Boulder is a work of incandescent, volcanic brevity and density.” —Nuvol
“Opposed to all family ties, and jealous of her partner’s child, our narrator refuses to resign herself to her new role of secondary character in her own story, and lashes out by drinking and engaging in clandestine sex with other women, much as would a character in a Charles Bukowski story (an author with whom Baltasar shares more than one stylistic affinity). With Boulder, Eva Baltasar goes beyond Permafrost, to the point that, as with Gillian Flynn's antiheroines, or the anti-superheroine Jessica Jones, the new femininity evokes the old masculinity.” —El Periódico
“Eva Baltasar amazed me last year [with Permafrost], and my conversion has been now been completed.” —Libros y Literatura
“In her second novel, Baltasar continues to work on her approach to the body, seen as the very substance of storytelling. Around bodies, considered both as sexual objects and as the medium through which our feelings must be expressed, she is building anew a language by which human beings may, in our era, be able to approach one another.” —Zenda libros
“Baltasar returns with the same expressiveness and lyricism as in Permafrost, but with a new complexity in her characters, addressing such vital issues such as motherhood and our increasing inability to communicate with one another—an epidemic in our era.” —Valencia Plaza
