I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Towards Darkness with Irene Solà
Tue 10 Jun 2025
7:00pm at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, 14-15 John St, Bath, BA1 2J
All tickets include 15% off any books purchased on the night, a glass of wine or soft drink, author talk, Q&A and signing.
Other ways to book:
Email books@mrbsemporium.com, call 01225 331155 or pop into the shop at 14-15 John Street, Bath. BA1 2JL.
We are incredibly excited to welcome Irene Solà all the way from Catalonia to talk to us about her bewitching new novel, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Towards Darkness.
Now translated into English by Mara Faye Lethem, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness has been a bestseller in Catalonia since publication and a huge hit in Spain. It is a stunning evocation of the magic and the demons inhabiting the Catalan mountains – perfect for fans of Mariana Enriquez, Olga Tokarczuk and Daisy Johnson.
Irene Solà is a writer and visual artist. Her first novel to be translated into English – When I Sing, Mountains Dance – has been a huge favourite of many of our booksellers at Mr B’s, particularly with our own Catalan bookseller, Laura Garcia Moreno, who Irene will be in conversation with. We hope you’ll join us for this unmissable event for one of our most anticipated books of the year.
About the book:
Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party.
As day turns to night, four hundred years’ worth of memories unspool, and the house reverberates with the women’s stories. Stories of mysterious visions, of those born without eyelashes and tongues or with deformed hearts. But it begins with the story of the matriarch Joana who double-crosses the devil, heedless of what the consequences might be.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a formally daring and entrancing novel in which Irene Sola explores the duality and essential link between light and darkness, life and death, oblivion and memory.
‘Irene Solà is unlike any other writer – she storms her own path, setting fire to all our preconceived notions of what a novel can do while she goes. I adored this book‘ — Daisy Johnson
‘Forged from the deepest and truest stories about the perversity of the body, the sheer drama of the natural world, and the vengeful side of the divine. A fecund and daring book‘ — Catherine Lacey