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by Pol Guasch
Survival is a moral quandary in this jagged, otherworldly debut charting forbidden love during an apocalypse.
In a near future devastated by war and unspecified natural disaster, a young man and his mother cling to survival at the edge of a forest. Society is militarized and dangerous, with men with shaved heads patrolling the land as families are uprooted and nature is all but decimated. The young man spends his days helping his mother, who is traumatized from her experience working in the ominous Factory, and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the forest. It's barely a life, but it's life nonetheless.
After a brutal act of desperate violence and the arrival of armed men at their doorstep, the young man leaves his mother and finds Boris, who travels with him through the forest to the city. Escaping slavers and trekking through the empty landscape, the two find moments of intimacy despite their circumstances. But as their survival comes with increasingly violent demands, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he's become the very thing he's fought to escape.
An award-winning, breakout novel from a blazingly original Catalonian poet, Pol Guasch's Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its beauty and devastation. Sparse, quick, and wrestling with big ideas, from the despoiling of the environment and totalitarianism to queerness and manhood, Guasch's debut is an unrelenting and extraordinarily artful exploration of the moral murkiness of survival.
"[A] bleakly brilliant novel...Intimations of other European modernists—Schnurre, Dürrenmatt, Cela—resound quietly throughout a text punctuated by museum-worthy photographs to stunning, memorable effect. An extraordinarily beautiful depiction of an extraordinarily ugly—and wholly credible—world in the making." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The fractured narrative, which unfolds like a series of prose poems, is intercut with Boris's abstract photographs, offering a record of their exodus and adding to the jagged testament to queer love. This is arresting." —Publishers Weekly
This information about Napalm in the Heart was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Pol Guasch is the author of two collections of poetry and two novels. The holder of a Master's Degree in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory from King's College London, he is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona. He has also been a writer-in-residence at the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Florence, Italy and Art Omi in New York. His debut novel Napalm al cor, which has been translated into six languages, won the 2021 Anagrama Novel Prize, making Guasch the youngest winner in the prize's history. He lives in Barcelona.
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