Boulder
Eva Baltasar, Julia Sanches (translation)Eva Baltasar demonstrates her pre-eminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world - in prose as brittle & beautiful as an ancient saga.
"... [a] tightly controlled meditation on sensuality, passion, & duty... 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 & mother... A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty & grace found within a family." — Kirkus Reviews
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Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know & love Samsa, who gives her the nickname ‘Boulder’. When the couple decides to move to Reykjavik together, Samsa announces that she wants to have a child. She is already 40 & can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by.
Boulder is less enthused but doesn’t know how to say no - & 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, & whether her yearning for freedom will trump her yearning for love.
"Boulder is a sensuous, sexy, intense book. Eva Baltasar condenses the sensations & experiences of a dozen more ordinary novels into just over 100 pages of exhilarating prose. An incisive story of queer love & motherhood that slices open the dilemmas of exchanging independence for intimacy." — 2023 International Booker Prize Judges
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Eva Baltasaris 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 three different women in the first person.