'Soaringly beautiful, urgent and disturbing... A masterpiece.' Colm Tóibín, from the introduction
Death in Spring is a dark and dream-like tale of a teenage boy's coming of age in a remote village in the Catalan mountains; a place cut off from the outside world, where cruel customs are blindly followed, and attempts at rebellion swiftly crushed. When his father dies, he must navigate this oppressive society alone, and learn how to live in a place of crippling conformity.
Often seen as an allegory for life under a dictatorship, Death in Spring is a bewitching and unsettling novel about power, exile, and the hope that comes from even the smallest gestures of independence.
'Rodoreda has bedazzled me' Gabriel Garcia Marquez
'Rodoreda's artistry is of the highest order' Diana Athill
'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.' Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing
"Rodoreda infuses surreal elements into her novel in a similar fashion to her Spanish-language, magical-realist counterparts, using the fantastic to draw out the strangeness of quotidian reality, but perhaps due to its brevity (Death in Spring comes in at only 150 pages) the magical seems far more saturated than in, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and serves to further the sense that the story takes place in a world impossibly close to but distinctly alien from ours."Hannah Manshel, The Front Table
"The bleakness of Rodoreda's outlook stands in dramatic contrast to the gorgeous lyricism of her prose. In Martha Tennent's translation, her sentences are richly luxuriant, embodying the fecund beauty of spring in bloom while also admitting the imminence of death and decay. Throughout Death in Spring, horror often creeps in right on beauty's heels."Ryan Michael Williams, Rain Taxi
"Tradition is a strange and curious thing. "Death in Spring,"is a novel from Catalan author Merce Rodoreda, expertly translated by Martha Tennent. Focusing on a small town and its strande customs, "Death in Spring" is a very special and highly recommended read."The Midwest Book Review
"The novel is suspenseful, pushing the reader through the images, memories, and voices that flow within the protagonist's often confused mind as he develops into manhood. Just as the unnamed protagonist must navigate a world of contradictions, the novel reflects Rodoreda's own political, social, and literary exile while speaking of a tyranny that feels almost uncanny in its incantation."Katherine Elaine Sanders, Bomb Magazine
"This novel is just one boy's account of living life; it is an example that tells us a story: a beautiful and evocative and viscerally bloody story about life and death."Patrick Gage Kelley, The Tartan
"Death in Spring is very different from any other story I've read. It's strange and unsettling but still compelling, and has stayed with me for many weeks as I try to work out its meaning. The obvious conclusion is that it is about the corruption of what is natural, as is death in the season of new life and rebirth."Charlotte Simpson, Belletrista
About the Author
Mercè Rodoreda is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled to France during the Spanish Civil War, and only able to return to Catalonia in the mid-1960s, she wrote a number of highly praised works, including The Time of the Doves and Death in Spring.
