I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward the Darkness by Irene Solà
From the very first page I was swept off my feet by how lush and otherworldly its atmosphere is. This Catalan-set tale left me feeling as if I were sitting right in that creaking farmhouse at dusk, hearing each whispered secret and haunting memories. Solà’s prose is earthy, grounded and fearless and so descriptive and vividly painted that you can almost hear the shadows crackling on the walls.
The story centers on Bernadeta, an old grandmother lying on her deathbed as the ghost of an ancestor keeps vigil over her and as her living descendants tidy around her, feed her, watch videos on their phones, and even do homework in the home’s kitchen. From there, as the home’s ghosts wait for her to die and prepare a welcoming feast of Catalan traditional cuisine, each of the living and dead women of Mas Clavell step forward to tell their piece of the tale that paints a portrait of rural Catalonia of the last 400 years. The story is full of reapers, bandits, wolfs, ghosts, superstitions and the devil itself, now as a goat as one of the women’s enemies, now as a bull as one of the women’s lovers.
Each voice is so unique and dizzying that you forget the whole book is contained on Bernadeta’s last day of life. I laughed, I gasped, and often I found myself wiping away tears, all swept up in the tales of all these cursed women who all look like a different animal.
On one scene we are in Bernadeta’s dim bedroom, where Solà seems to make the very darkness a character, the blackness is described so gorgeously ‘purple and fidgety’ that it almost breathes on the page. As Bernadeta lies snoring violently, you can practically feel the weight of every silent moment when her ancestor Margarida thinks the end has come… until Bernadeta unexpectedly sighs and stirs again. The tension is breathtaking. Through Margarida’s fervent prayers for all the women of the family, Solà then guides us over generations. We hear Margarida name one by one the relatives she loves or loathes: her own prideful mother Joana (the original matriarch with the devil’s bargain who cheated him and therefore cursed the family), her contentious sister, even the niece who should rot in hell, and her husband’s lover and victim. Margarida is a small, severe woman, and watching her tend the bed through the night made me ache with empathy. In her whispered litany you sense all the grudges, regrets, and fierce devotion that have built up in this family.
As the sky lightens, Solà shifts tone and the novel becomes almost celebratory. All the women, the living and the departed, gather as if at a great, ghostly banquet for Bernadeta. Around a long table in the courtyard, leaning back with full bellies, telling bawdy jokes in the fragrant air. It’s such a surreal, joyful counterpoint to the solemn morning: the house actually seems to come alive with laughter and feasting. Solà balances this eeriness with warmth beautifully. This is not a gloomy gothic ghost story, at least not as a whole, but a fiercely life-affirming one: grief and ghosts mingle with folklore and love, and by the end you feel oddly comforted, as if you’d attended a wake that somehow felt like a wild, healing festival. I won’t spoil the end but I will say that I closed the book glowing. This is a novel that makes me want to run and recommend it to every customer looking for something powerful and unforgettable. It definitely is my book of the year. Solà’s I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward the Darkness is a little miracle of a book, it carries the weight of generations yet dances with the western breeze. – Laura GM
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey
An eerie, coming-of-age novel set in an alternate history Britain. It’s 1979 and triplets Vincent, William, and Lawrence are the last remaining residents of the Captain Scott Home for Boys. Under the watchful eyes of Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon, and Mother Night, the three boys spend their days learning from the Book of Knowledge, dictating their nightmares for the Book of Dreams, and being written up in the Book of Guilt. They dream of being cured of the mysterious Bug that has plagued them their whole lives and joining their friends at the Big House in Margate. But when the government decides to shut down the Sycamore Scheme and all its homes, the boys begin to understand that they’ve been lied to their whole lives… – Nethmi