Author(s): Irene Sola

Novel | Translated fiction | Spain

 When Domenec - mountain-dweller, father, poet, dreamer - dies suddenly, struck by lightning, he leaves behind two small children, Mia and Hilari, to grow up wild among the looming summits of the Pyrenees and the ghosts of the Spanish civil war. But then Hilari dies too, and his sister is forced to face life's struggles and joys alone. As the years tumble by, the inhabitants of the mountain - human, animal and other - come together in a chorus of voices to bear witness to the sorrows of one family, and to the savage beauty of the landscape. This remarkable English-language debut is lyrical, mythical, elemental, and ferociously imaginative. A prize-winning, spell-binding, polyphonic debut of love, wildness and tragedy that marks the generations - for readers of Sarah Baume and Max Porter.

When Domenec - mountain-dweller, father, poet, dreamer - dies suddenly, struck by lightning, he leaves behind two small children, Mia and Hilari, to grow up wild among the looming summits of the Pyrenees and the ghosts of the Spanish civil war.

But then Hilari dies too, and his sister is forced to face life's struggles and joys alone. As the years tumble by, the inhabitants of the mountain - human, animal and other - come together in a chorus of voices to bear witness to the sorrows of one family, and to the savage beauty of the landscape. This remarkable English-language debut is lyrical, mythical, elemental, and ferociously imaginative.

Review: When I Sing, Mountains Dance made me swoon. Translated with great musicality and wit, it is rich and ranging, shimmering with human and non-human life, the living and the dead, in our time and deep time; a fable that is utterly universal, deadly funny and profoundly moving -- Max Porter

There's so much beauty in this wonderful polyphonic novel. Each page makes you fall in love again with nature, with imagination, with words, with life. When I Sing, Mountains Dance is timeless and unique -- Mariana Enriquez

Like nothing I've read before. This novel is a feral, yowling love howl to a place of such staggering majesty that it resists usual comprehension. By giving voice to animals, storms, outcasts, one-legged girls, birthing women, and the mountain itself, Sola pushes past the limits of human experience to tell a story of instinct and earth-time that is irresistible in its jagged glory. -- C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills is Gold

Irene Sola is a magnificent writer, When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a creepy, earthy masterpiece -- Camilla Grudova, author of The Doll's Alphabet

Sola's prose, excellently translated from the original Catalan, is expansive and tactile. Her sentences accumulate, running along, taking in as much as possible, senses alert... Sola convincingly implicates everyone in the quickening pace of history and environmental decline... this attentive, playful, responsive novel makes an excellent case for stopping and listening -- Christopher Shrimpton * Guardian *

Mara Faye Lethem's translation magnificently preserves the dreamy, haunting tone of the original... [and] Sola's distinctive lyricism... When I Sing, Mountains Dance illuminates the delicate, mutable relationship we have to the places that dictate how we understand ourselves -- Ella Fox-Martens * TLS *

This novel about, well, everything, is fine-tuned to a kind of astonished and astonishing connectivity that's an act of revolutionary revitalisation up against the odds of any despairing. —Ali Smith

Author Biography: Irene Sola is twenty-nine years old and widely regarded as the most significant young Catalan writer. Her poetry has been featured in Granta online. When I Sing, Mountains Dance won the prestigious Anagrama Prize and has been translated into six languages.