Boulder
**Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize**
The grim and lovely follow-up to Eva Baltasar’s acclaimed Permafrost explores the darker sides of love and motherhood for two women determined to live as they like.
Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname 'Boulder'. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn’t know how to say no—and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien.
With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.
Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her preeminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world — and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.
Already an acclaimed poet, with ten volumes of poetry to her name, Eva Baltasar’s debut novel Permafrost received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers, was an Indie Next choice from American booksellers, and was shortlisted for France’s 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book. Boulder won the prestigious Omnium Prize for the Best Catalan Novel of 2020. The author lives a simple life with her wife and two daughters in a Catalonian village near the mountains.
Julia Sanches translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Among her translations are Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim award, as well as works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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