Pol Guasch – författare

Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker"Pol Guasch must be one of the best young writers working today. This novel is entirely resolute and clear-hearted." —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X"Profoundly strange and beautiful, formally bold and lyrically elevated." —The GuardianSurvival 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. The young man spends his days taking care of the home and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the woods. It's barely a life, but it's a life nonetheless, despite the menacing soldiers patrolling the land. But after the young man commits a brutal act of desperate violence to protect his mother, he leaves home to find the mercurial Boris, who travels with him on a search for safety. When the journey's demands threaten his precarious relationship with Boris as well as his own moral compass, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he has become the very danger he fought to escape.An award-winning novel from a blazingly original Catalonian writer, Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its intimacy, poetry, and devastation. Spare and quick, Guasch's debut is an artful, affecting story of star-crossed love under siege and the moral murkiness of survival.

"Mesmeric and beautiful." -Colm ToibinIn a rapidly deteriorating world, two best friends pursue a future worth believing in, in this second novel from "one of the best young writers working today" (Catherine Lacey).When Rita and Liton meet at a party, they quickly form a bond that will indelibly shape their lives. Theirs is not an easy world: most wildlife is extinct and the earth is tormented by drought and floods; the last vestiges of natural life are kept under lock and key in a mysterious greenhouse a day's travel away. Like the other young men of the Service, Liton is frequently enlisted to put out the seemingly never-ending fires that tear through the valley; Rita lives perched on a hill in the Colony, where other men, including her father, empty an almost barren mine. Yet their bond grounds them. They navigate the love affairs, setbacks, and thwarted idealism of their twenties together, finding in each other a vital reprieve for their disillusionment-that is, until Liton, like other gay men, falls deathly sick. Unraveling back and forth across time, and told through the voices, conversations, and letters of a tapestry of characters, Pol Guasch's Paradise Burns is a poetic, riveting exploration of an uncannily familiar ecological and existential grief, and a lament for an entire generation forced to inherit a world they feel unable to change. But above all, the internationally celebrated Guasch-crowned as "the spokesperson for a generation" (La Vanguardia) in his native Spain -has written a profoundly moving and astoundingly imaginative paean to the power of friendship: what it protects in a fallen world, and how, through love, it allows us to imagine a better one.