Permafrost

Winner of the Llibreter prize chosen by booksellers

Longlisted for 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

Permafrost’s no-bullshit lesbian

narrator is an uninhibited lover and a wickedly funny observer of modern life. Desperate to get out of Barcelona, she goes to

Brussels, ‘because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing

was a city I knew I would like’; as an au pair in

Scotland, she develops a hatred of the colour green. And everywhere she goes,

she tries to break out of the roles set for her by family and society, chasing

escape wherever it can be found: love affairs, travel, thoughts of suicide.

Full of powerful, physical imagery, this prize-winning debut novel by acclaimed Catalan poet Eva Baltasar was a word-of-mouth hit in its own language. It is a breathtakingly forthright call for women’s freedom to embrace both pleasure and solitude, and speaks boldly of the body, of sex, and of the self.