When I Sing Mountains Dance Canto Jo I La Muntanya Balla A Novel Irene Sol by Irene Solà, Mara Faye Lethem (translation) 9781644450802, 9781644451700, 1644450801, 1644451700 instant download after payment.

2023 Nota Bene Prize Winner

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle's Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize

A spellbinding novel that places one family's tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself.

Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to "reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain." He gathers black chanterelles & attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell, full of electrifying power. Reckless, gleeful, they release their bolts of lightning, one of which strikes Domènec. He dies. The ghosts of 17th-century witches gather around him, taking up the chanterelles he'd harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains & the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance, winner of the European Union Prize, is a giddy paean to the land in all its interconnectedness, & in it Sola finds a distinct voice for each extraordinary consciousness: the lightning bolts, roe-deer, mountains, the ghosts of the civil war, the widow Sió & later her grown children, Hilari & Mia, as well as Mia’s lovers with their long-buried secrets & their hidden pain.

Irene Solà animates the polyphonic world around us, the fierce music of the seasons, as well as the stories we tell to comprehend loss & love on a personal, historical, & even geological scale. Lyrical, elemental, & mythic, hers is a fearlessly imaginative new voice that brilliantly renders both our tragedies & our triumphs.

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Irene Solà is a writer & visual artist. She is the author of the novels The Dams, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, & I Gave You Eyes & You Looked Toward Darkness, & Beast, a poetry collection. 

Mara Faye Lethem is an award-winning translator & author of the novel A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small.