Permafrost

Permafrost’s no-bullshit lesbian narrator is an uninhibited lover & a wickedly funny observer of modern life. Desperate to get out of Barcelona, she goes to Brussels, ‘because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was a city I knew I would like’; as an au pair in Scotland, she develops a hatred of the colour green. And everywhere she goes, she tries to break out of the roles set for her by family & society, chasing escape wherever it can be found: love affairs, travel, thoughts of suicide.

Full of powerful, physical imagery, this prize-winning debut novel by acclaimed Catalan poet Eva Baltasar was a word-of-mouth hit in its own language. It is a breathtakingly forthright call for women’s freedom to embrace both pleasure & solitude, & speaks boldly of the body, of sex, & of the self.

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Eva Baltasar is an author & poet who has published 10 volumes of poetry, to widespread acclaim. Her debut novel, Permafrost, received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers & was shortlisted for France’s 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book. It is the first novel in a triptych, which aims to explore the universes of 3 different women in the first person. The author lives a simple life with their wife & two daughters in a village near the mountains. Her novel Boulder was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023.

Julia Sanches translates works from Portuguese, Spanish, & Catalan into English. She is a founding member of Cedilla & Co., a collective of translators committed to making international voices heard in English, & chair of the Translators Group of the Authors Guild. Her other translations include Boulder by Eva Balthasar & Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver. Her website describes her translations as concise, readable & idiomatic, & the idiomatic certainly proved true with Andrea Abreu’s Dogs of Summer.