"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 Guardian
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. 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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
"Profoundly strange and beautiful, formally bold and lyrically elevated." —The Guardian
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. 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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Pol Guasch has written a punk novel whose title quotes Iggy Pop's 'heart full of napalm,' but there is no rock here and no animal roaming the streets. We instead find ourselves in a mysterious world of the future, or of the past. It is a world of desire and survival, in the aftermath of an apocalypse marked by different languages, obscure repression, and prose as mysterious as it is beautiful." - Mariana Enríquez
"Eerie and compelling, Napalm in the Heart retains its mystery without sacrificing any of its dramatic action. A gripping debut." - Nicole Flattery
"What is the language of love? What is the grammar of survival? Pol Guasch sketches a beautiful response to these urgent questions, weaving a powerful tale of desire and resistance in which an old world is mourned and a new world is imagined. Reading this book is like traversing a dark forest and spotting, when night seemed to devour it all, the light of the fireflies as the glimmer of hope. A beautiful tale of survival, love and resistance." - Carlos Fonseca
"Pol Guasch must be one of the best young writers working today. This novel is entirely resolute and clear-hearted." - Catherine Lacey
"Pol Guasch creates an atmosphere that is menacing and powerfully dramatic, but he is also a poet who is interested in image and tone, in texture and rhythmic variation. This mixture gives his innovative and original novel a mesmeric force, wonderfully captured in this translation." - Colm Tóibín
"Pol Guasch has crafted in his story a struggle for existence that never gives up on his characters' dreams. Napalm in the Heart challenges the boundaries between delicacy and brutality, creating an unforgettable novel in the process." - Alejandro Zambra
"Eerie and compelling, Napalm in the Heart retains its mystery without sacrificing any of its dramatic action. A gripping debut." - Nicole Flattery
"What is the language of love? What is the grammar of survival? Pol Guasch sketches a beautiful response to these urgent questions, weaving a powerful tale of desire and resistance in which an old world is mourned and a new world is imagined. Reading this book is like traversing a dark forest and spotting, when night seemed to devour it all, the light of the fireflies as the glimmer of hope. A beautiful tale of survival, love and resistance." - Carlos Fonseca
"Pol Guasch must be one of the best young writers working today. This novel is entirely resolute and clear-hearted." - Catherine Lacey
"Pol Guasch creates an atmosphere that is menacing and powerfully dramatic, but he is also a poet who is interested in image and tone, in texture and rhythmic variation. This mixture gives his innovative and original novel a mesmeric force, wonderfully captured in this translation." - Colm Tóibín
"Pol Guasch has crafted in his story a struggle for existence that never gives up on his characters' dreams. Napalm in the Heart challenges the boundaries between delicacy and brutality, creating an unforgettable novel in the process." - Alejandro Zambra
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Pol Guasch's Napalm in the Heart