Stone in a Landslide

Written with beautiful simplicity, Stone in a Landslide is the story of one woman's life in all its ordinariness and its extraordinariness.

The novel is narrated by Conxa, a woman growing up in rural Catalonia who lives through almost all of the twentieth century. Conxa unfolds her whole life, from the childhood trauma of leaving her mother's home to live with her aunt and uncle in a small mountain village, to the giddy passion of falling in love and the loneliness of old age.

Barbal expertly recreates a sense of the village's slow pace of life:  the days spent working on the land, the village gossips, and the thrill of the first dance at the annual festival.

The nightmare of the civil war is presented as a dark chapter in Conxa's long life. Her beloved husband is murdered and her daughters are branded as 'reds'. Despite surviving these horrors, village life cannot stay the same forever. Conxa must face the intrusion of the modern world and unwanted change.

Barbal - one of Spain's most influential Catalan authors -offers a convincing and moving portrait of a traditional way of life which has now almost disappeared.